[Marxism] Watercolors

[Les Schaffer <schaffer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

February 17, 2004
Ohio Town's Water at Last Runs Past a Color Line
By JAMES DAO

ZANESVILLE, Ohio — In January, a strange thing happened when people 
along Coal Run Road turned on their taps. Drinking water came out. Not 
the sulfur-tinged, bug-infested stuff that collected in their cisterns 
or swirled in their wells. Cool, clean, 
straight-from-the-pumping-station city water.

[snip]

The story of how they got that water, and were for years denied it, 
seems anachronistic in 21st-century America. But it speaks volumes, the 
residents contend, about disparities in living standards that are 
related to the color of one's skin.

For years, decades really, residents of the hollow had been asking local 
officials to extend water lines down their narrow, twisting roads. Not 
enough water pressure, they were told. Too expensive. Too hilly.

Yet just up the hill, not 200 yards away, homeowners have had running 
municipal water for years. One new homeowner even installed a hot tub 
and routinely sprinkled his lawn, something residents of the hollow 
could never do with their 1,000-gallon cisterns, which were constantly 
running dry.

Almost all the people living at the top of the hill are white. Almost 
all the people in the hollow are racially mixed: white, black and 
American Indian. And it increasingly seemed to residents of the hollow 
that this had something to do with their plight.

full at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/17/national/17WATE.html





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