The 54-mile stretch of U.S. Route 80 connecting Montgomery to Selma appears unremarkable at first—just another highway cutting through Alabama’s Black Belt, where pine forests occasionally give way to scattered homes and rural crossroads. But this highway is paved with history. Here, civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis marched for voting rights in 1965. In Selma, where the highway transforms into broad city streets, state troopers violently assaulted peaceful demonstrators in the watershed moment known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Today, a new champion has emerged from the hallowed ground of Lowndes County: Catherine Coleman Flowers. At 66, Flowers presents a gentle demeanor that belies her formidable influence as an advocate for the forgotten communities of the Black Belt and rural America more broadly. While she began to gain recognition a decade ago for exposing the sewage crisis in the region—where untreated waste even today regularly bubbles up into yards and homes—her mission transcends basic sanitation. Flowers has led the charge in connecting environmental justice and climate change with deep-rooted social inequities. In doing so, she has elevated local struggles into a national conversation about whose communities deserve protection and dignity.
“What Catherine is trying to do is to open up a new conversation about what it means to look at these problems,” Bryan Stevenson, the acclaimed public-interest lawyer who runs the Equal Justice Initiative and who has worked with Flowers, told me.
But her strength comes from more than just her message. Flowers has an eye for pragmatism. Her work crosses political and ideological boundaries that can hold back other advocates, and she is willing to work with anyone sincere about helping those struggling in her neck of rural America. It’s a skill fit for these polarized times.
Flowers is a daughter of Lowndes County. Born in Birmingham, she moved with her family to Lowndes—her father’s hometown—during childhood. Flowers recalls civil rights leaders gathering in the house she grew up in, a stopping point in their activism. Flowers says this exposure “fed my hunger” in fighting for change. “People have asked me, ‘Why have you done this for so long?’” she says. “Because I’m from Lowndes County.”
As an adult, Flowers followed a winding path to where she is today. In her words, she’s lived many lives. She attended university in Alabama, then Oklahoma, served a stint in the Air Force, and took on teaching jobs in Washington, D.C., before returning to Lowndes in 2000 on a mission to improve the community that raised her. Early on, she focused on economic development working as a consultant for Lowndes County. In her view, attracting companies to the area would bring investment that would in turn aid local residents. So, in 2002 she set up the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise with that goal in mind. But she quickly ran into a problem: businesses didn’t want to set up shop in a place with infrastructure problems—namely, the lack of adequate sanitation throughout much of the region.
The problem sounds simple, but it’s a thorny and persistent one. The majority of homes in the area lack a connection to the sewer system. Septic tanks can provide a solution, but in a county where the median income is $35,000, many simply can’t afford the price tag, which regularly exceeds $10,000. And stories abound of those who have paid but have been left with septic tanks that still fail. All you need to do to understand the problem is walk around a neighborhood. Sewage is in yards and common areas. It’s worse in heavy rain—increasingly a problem with climate change as warmer air holds more moisture. A 2017 survey of Lowndes found that 42% of residents had raw sewage on site.
So, for more than two decades, Flowers has pushed for change. In 2004, she brought banking executives to town who helped facilitate new mobile homes and septic systems for some families most in need. In 2010, after working with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and then Senator Jeff Sessions, a conservative Republican from Alabama, she helped the county get funds to study the scale of the problem. She brought in public-health researchers to study ailments that affected residents, learning that exposure to raw sewage led to the spread of hookworm, a parasite that causes a wide range of ailments and was once thought to be eradicated in the U.S. More than a third of those tested in the county were found to be infected. And, separately, surveyors uncovered that a wastewater-treatment system recommended by local officials was failing residents at high rates. “For policymakers, if the data is not there, it doesn’t exist, even though it’s a problem,” she told me.
Flowers’ work on sanitation issues that affect local water infrastructure is definitionally environmental. And it’s getting worse because of the changing climate. Higher rainfall and more flooding means more stress to sewage systems. In a testament to this intersection, in 2019 she changed the name of her organization to the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice to highlight the link between the environmental and economic angles.
But she has also mastered the art of meeting people where they are, speaking about climate in some contexts while leaning into the implications for livelihoods and health in others.
Over the past several years, her efforts have found growing success. She brought reporters to Lowndes to draw attention to the problem, and in 2017 she invited a top U.N. official tasked with addressing extreme poverty. She soon began to fieldcalls from communities around the country facing similar problems. More than 2 million people in the U.S. lack access to clean and safe running water—and so she turned around and elevated those stories with policymakers and in the national media too. With increased public attention, she was able to get the Biden Administration on board. In 2022, federal officials announced a program to provide assistance for Americans without reliable waste-water management. The announcement came as part of a broader $11.7 billion commitment to addressing wastewater issues through loans and grants for water infrastructure, and Lowndes would serve as a pilot.
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“Lowndes County has never gotten credit for its role in fighting for democracy and voting rights,” she told me. “But hopefully we’ll also get the proper credit for fighting for equity and sanitation rights.”
It’s fair to say that Flowers maintained a good relationship with the Biden Administration. One week when I visited Flowers in Alabama in 2022, she was showing around President Biden’s infrastructure czar and two Cabinet officials. Indeed, she held hands with Biden himself in 2023 as they walked from the Oval Office to the White House Rose Garden for him to sign an Executive Order promoting environmental justice. “You’re a great leader, Catherine, I really mean it,” Biden said.
Nonetheless, Flowers is not an aggressive partisan. Early in her career, she worked with conservatives on economic development. And in her latest book published this year, Holy Ground, she praises Sessions, an adamant conservative and former Trump Attorney General, alongside Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. She portrays GOP Senator Tommy Tuberville, who represents Alabama and aligns closely with Trump, as a potential ally.
“What I try to do is find some commonality, and hopefully in the process we can develop a rapport and eventually some respect for each other,” she says.
Nor is she a deep ideologue. While many in the environmental community take firm, unyielding positions, Flowers comes with an open mind. In 2023, I attended as she brought together environmental-justice leaders for a thoughtful discussion about carbon dioxide removal—a technology that many other environmental justice leaders rejected flat out as a cop-out that would allow companies to continue polluting. And, while many advocates went out of their way to dismiss Sultan Al Jaber, the oil executive charged with leading the 2023 U.N. climate conference in Dubai, Flowers took the time to meet him—and even posted about it on social media.
“The more people that are into doing the work, the less I have to do,” she told me of her willingness to collaborate. “And the closer we get to where we need to be, which is to put us out of business.”
It’s no secret that the environmental justice cause faces steep challenges in the coming months. The U.S. federal government has done a complete 180-degree turn, undoing Biden’s environmental-justice executive orders and leaving some afraid to speak out on those issues. The chilling effect shouldn’t be underestimated. And yet Flowers’s story offers a way forward. Drawing on her graduate studies in history, her work exposes the dark underbelly of America’s environmental injustices. In her writing and her public speaking, she doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of history, explaining how people of color have been harmed by discriminatory policy. But she also isn’t sharing that history to win partisan political points.
“Throughout rural America people are living without working sanitation,” she told me after Trump took office. “And that is an issue that should remain a priority no matter who’s in the White House.”