Citation
Mr. President, I have the great honor of presenting the widely acclaimed scholar known as the “Father of Environmental Justice,” whose pioneering research has transformed our understanding of how the degradation of our natural world disproportionately impacts communities of color: Dr. Robert D. Bullard. Dr. Bullard is the Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University; the founder and director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice; an author and activist.
Dr. Bullard, your journey to the upper echelons of academia and social-environmental policy began in a small Alabama town that routinely denied Black neighborhoods access to municipal services like sewers, streetlights, and paved roads. You never forgot the hard lessons of your youth. In your seminal 1990 book “Dumping in Dixie” — described in The New York Times as “the environmental justice bible” — you exposed how industry and government have long acted in tandem to perpetuate a system where the pollution of the air, water, and soil by the siting of toxic waste facilities and landfills burdens communities with high percentages of poor, elderly, young, and minority residents.
Inspired by your hero, the writer and civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois, you became a champion for the disenfranchised, the voiceless, and the vulnerable, creating a movement that has fought against the literal poisoning of black and brown bodies by corporate interests. You’ve taken that fight into the courts and the classrooms, onto the streets and inside the corridors of power, where your insistent and eloquent advocacy helped convince President Bill Clinton to sign the Environmental Justice Executive Order. In 2021, you earned an appointment by President Joe Biden to the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. And in 2022, 60 billion dollars were earmarked in the historic climate spending bill to ensure equal environmental protections for all, the cause to which you have dedicated your life.
Dr. Bullard, you once told an interviewer, “You can be a scholar and an activist, and you can do something to make change.”
Indeed. You awakened us to the environmental injustices hiding in plain sight, and challenged us as a country, as humans, to do better and be better. Thanks to your enduring scholarship and tireless activism, change has come.
Mr. President, on behalf of the trustees, faculty, students, and staff at Clark University, it gives me great pleasure to request that the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, be conferred upon Dr. Robert D. Bullard.