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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Nov. 14, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Cancer linked to racist polluters

By Bill Allen in San Francisco

Breast-cancer survivors, joined by community and environmental-justice activists, marched here Oct. 23 in a "Cancer Industry Tour" to confront corporate polluters and demand health and environmental justice.

Angered by rising rates of breast cancer, over 200 people marched from Chevron's corporate headquarters to the offices of other big polluters, their public-relations firms, elected officials and the American Cancer Society.

This was the Third Annual Cancer Industry Tour of San Francisco sponsored by the Toxic Links Coalition. The coalition is a diverse body uniting breast-cancer activists with communities of color living near polluting facilities and environmental-justice groups.

The Cancer Industry Tour was organized in response to the polluter-promoted Breast Cancer Awareness Month. The purpose of the tour was to expose the links between toxic and nuclear pollution and the rising rates of breast cancer and other illnesses.

Breast-cancer surviv ors and community residents from low-income communities of color denounced the corporate polluters for poisoning their communities. They charged government officials and the American Cancer Society with com plicity in doing nothing to stop pollution known to cause cancer and other ill-health effects.

Protesters called for preventing cancer through preventing pollution-in contrast to Breast Cancer Awareness Month's focus on industry-promoted treatment and supposed cures for cancer.

Residents of the predominantly African American communities of San Francisco's Bayview Hunters Point and of Richmond credited this new alliance with recent victories against polluters in their heavily contaminated neighborhoods.

A new power plant proposed for Bayview Hunters Point was defeated this summer after hundreds of neighborhood residents, joined by breast-cancer survivors and environmental-justice activists, packed a Board of Supervisors meeting. The project was voted down.

A study had just shown that African American women under 50 in Bayview Hunters Point have twice the rate of breast cancer as women in other parts of San Francisco.

Richmond residents thanked the Toxic Links Coalition and the growing movement for health and environmental justice for helping them finally win an eight-year fight to shut down the Chevron Chemical Co. hazardous-waste incinerator in their community.

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