Drowning in a Dead River: The Mothers of Charter Oak Terrace and Urban Resistance to Ecological Catastrophe.

For Black mothers, as much as water protects, nourishes, and sustains their children's lives, it also restrains, suffocates, and degrades them. The residents of Hartford, Connecticut's Charter Oak Terrace public housing project confronted a water-based ecological catastrophe in the 1960s. A flooding river—channeled by municipal neglect, state divestment, class inequality, and racial segregation—drowned several of their children. The neighborhood's Black mothers forged the Association of Concerned Parents of Charter Oak (ACP) and demanded that the city halt the nearby highway construction that propelled the river's overflow. This article excavates the unwritten history of the Black women–led ACP and chronicles an early rendering of a local environmental justice movement. Importantly, it contends that as their exclusion from citizenship and structural vulnerability forced them to witness the river gather their children, they also witnessed and foretold the onset of climate change and the rising water levels it incited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]