Please join us for our second virtual 2026 Reed Fink Award Talk “The Smell of Money: Local and Worker Pushback against Industrial Pollutants in Covington, Virginia” by Matthew Powell PhD Candidate University of Georgia on 9/29 at 2:00 pm EST
Abstract:
In the late 1960s, the people of Covington, Virginia, sought to renegotiate the tradeoff between their town’s economic and environmental concerns, what locals commonly referred to as “The Smell of Money”. Two disparate movements converged. Paper mill workers used their union to prevent chemical harm to workers in the mill. Meanwhile, community leaders and activists sought to use local government to prevent chemical damage to the surrounding environment, and developed a committee committed to enforcing strict regulations. These two groups were, at first glance, largely independent of one another, with the middle-class Local Committee having little overlap with the paper workers that constituted the majority of the town’s population. These movements wrestled with the mill’s noxious effects in the late 1960s in their own ways, both as workers within the mill, and as citizens living beside it. Notably, the two groups did not converge at some mutually developed middle ground. After years of research and drafting regulations, local activists came to embrace the same concerns and support the same improvements as workers had for years prior. The result was a powerful cross-class coalition that effectively stood up to both the polluting paper mill and a state government all too willing to look the other way.
Please register here: https://gsu-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/TYgmk3lPS-eDucytMCmWDg