I had a similar experience early in 2016, when I read a story in the newspaper about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. An alarming number of children were sick with lead poisoning, apparently because state authorities had failed to properly test or treat the water supply. I spent years as First Lady and as a Senator working to reduce the danger to kids from lead paint poisoning, which threatens the health of hundreds of thousands of young children across our country. But I’d never even heard of anything like what was happening in Flint.
The city used to be a thriving center for auto manufacturing, but, as vividly documented in Michael Moore’s 1989 film Roger & Me, the city was slowly hollowed out by plant closings and job losses. By 2013, the median household income was less than $25,000, and more than 40 percent of residents, most of them black, lived in poverty. In 2013 and 2014, the city’s emergency fiscal manager appointed by Michigan’s Republican Governor came up with a plan to save a little money: instead of buying drinking water from Detroit’s municipal system, as the city had long done, it would draw from the Flint River.
Almost immediately, families in town began to complain about the color, taste, and odor of the water, as well as rashes and other health concerns. Parents brought bottles of brown, smelly water to show officials. “This is what my baby is drinking,” they said. “This is what she bathes in.” They were ignored or given false assurances that the water was safe to drink. It was the cruelest kind of indifference. It turns out the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality never treated the river water with an anticorrosive agent that would have cost just $200 a day. That violation of federal law caused lead to leach from pipes into the city’s water. Children under the age of five years old are the most vulnerable to lead poisoning, which can irreparably harm brain development and cause learning and behavioral problems. In Flint, thousands of kids may have been exposed, and the rate of lead poisoning diagnosed among children nearly doubled.
For two years or so, the state government hardly did anything about the problem. It wasn’t until a group of outside doctors performed their own testing and exposed just how toxic the water was that the public health crisis became national news. When I heard about it in January 2016, I was appalled. I asked members of my team to go to Flint right away and see if they could learn more. I also called the Mayor, Karen Weaver, and asked, “What can I do to help?” She was eager for anything that would put a spotlight on Flint and pressure on the Governor to finally help fix things.
So that’s exactly what I did. I raised a ruckus out on the campaign trail and on television, and called on the Governor to declare a state of emergency, which would trigger federal aid. Within a few hours, he did. That just made me more determined to keep banging the drum. At the end of the next Democratic primary debate, the moderator, Lester Holt, asked, “Is there anything that you really wanted to say tonight that you haven’t gotten a chance to say?” I jumped at the opportunity to tell a national audience about what was happening in Flint.
“Every single American should be outraged,” I said. “A city in the United States of America where the population which is poor in many ways and majority African American has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water—and the Governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care.” I was getting pretty worked up. “I’ll tell you what,” I continued, “if the kids in a rich suburb of Detroit had been drinking contaminated water and being bathed in it, there would’ve been action.”
That comment may have made some people uncomfortable, but it’s hard to deny that what happened in Flint never would have happened in an affluent community like Grosse Pointe. State authorities would have rushed to help, and resources would have poured in. By the same token, the schools in wealthy Bloomfield Hills are never going to look like the schools in Detroit, where children sit in classrooms infested with rodents and mold, with ceilings caving in and the heat barely functioning. All across the country, there are examples of poor communities and communities of color living with dangerous levels of toxic pollution—and it’s always children who pay the biggest price.
After the debate, my campaign team was thrilled. Finally, they thought I was showing the kind of passion they believed voters wanted to see. For months, we had been losing the “outrage primary.” Bernie was outraged about everything. He thundered on at every event about the sins of “the millionaires and billionaires.” I was more focused on offering practical solutions that would address real problems and make life better for people. But now, in defense of those sick kids in Flint, I was the one full of righteous indignation.
A couple weeks later, I went to Flint to see what was happening for myself. It was even more heartbreaking than I imagined. Mayor Weaver and I sat down with a group of mothers in the pastor’s office of the House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church. I noticed that the church’s water fountains were all marked “Out of Order,” a small reminder of what this town had been living with for the past two years.
Then the mothers told me their stories. One shared that she’d been pregnant with twins when she had a reaction to the poisoned water. “It was so horrible,” she said. First, she went to the emergency room with a rash. Then she had a miscarriage and needed a blood transfusion. It was emotionally devastating. What’s more, it bothered her that every resident had to pay a hefty fee to use the water in the first place. Imagine, she said, “paying for poison.”
“I have seizures now. That’s something I didn’t have before,” another mom told me, fighting back tears. “Our lives have been just so damaged.”
“Our conversations are not about birthdays anymore. They’re not about swimming lessons,” said a third mother. “They’re about hospital visits and going to the ER.”
One mom, Nakiya, introduced me to her adorable six-year-old son, Jaylon. He was scampering around us, taking pictures with a phone, smiling from ear to ear. Nakiya told me he’d been exposed to high levels of lead and was now having trouble in school. All I wanted to do was scoop Jaylon up in my arms, hold him tight, and promise that everything was going to be okay. Later, after speaking to the church congregation, I found Nakiya and Jaylon again. Barb Kinney, our campaign photographer, asked if he’d like to try out her fancy Nikon camera. Jaylon’s eyes got big as flashbulbs, and he nodded his head. Soon he was snapping shots like a pro.
Before we left, I gave Jaylon a big hug. But I couldn’t promise that everything would be okay or that the problems in Flint would go away anytime soon. In fact, I was worried that Republicans in Michigan and Washington still weren’t taking the crisis seriously.
I wanted to do more to help. The people of Flint couldn’t wait for the next election. They certainly couldn’t wait for the Revolution. They needed change right away. “The Mayor said something that struck me,” I told a few local leaders. “Rather than have people come in from the outside, let’s hire people from the inside. Every church could be a dispensing station or an organizing hub.” We made plans to keep in touch.
As soon as I got on the plane, I turned to Maya. I was burning with frustration over what I’d seen. “How could this have happened?” I fumed. “It’s criminal! We’ve got to do something about it.” Over the next several weeks, we worked with Mayor Weaver, local pastors, the community college, the NAACP, and others to line up support and funding for a new public-private partnership that hired unemployed young people to deliver clean water to families who needed it. Chelsea made two visits of her own and helped launch the Mayor’s program. People from across the country also answered the call to help. Hundreds of union plumbers arrived to install water filters for free. Students at universities all over the Midwest raised funds for clean water deliveries. A kindergartner in New Hampshire, who lost his first tooth and received $5 from the tooth fairy, told his parents he wanted to donate it “so those little kids can have water.” His mom was so proud, she sat down right away and wrote me a letter about it.