Jacksonville, Florida’s Gun Violence Is Rooted in Redlining and Homes Built on Toxic Waste

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In a Florida county with a startling rate of child firearm injuries, a boarded-up elementary school named for famed educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune sits in a 250-acre site once called “Brown’s Dump.” The dump emerged in an era of redlining, systematic racism that divided American cities large and small. From the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, the city operated a landfill here, heaping toxic ash from nearby municipal incinerators. The Duval County School Board in the 1950s built a school there. On the surrounding land, developers built homes and apartment complexes. Generations of Black children lived, learned, and played on the polluted land. It was first assessed as a potential Superfund site in 1985. In 1999, the federal government and state of Florida said the soil at Brown’s Dump “posed a potential public health hazard.” The school closed in 2001. And eight years later, officials finally began the process of cleaning up lead, arsenic, and other contaminants. But the poisons had seeped into the lifeblood of residents. The harm to their physical and mental health is tied today to another public health crisis: high rates of gun violence...