CATHERINE COLEMAN FLOWERS

This environmental-justice leader knows that to truly solve things means collaborating—with everyone

- JUSTIN WORLAND

THE 54-MILE STRETCH OF U.S. ROUTE 80 CONNECTING MONTGOMERY to Selma appears unremarkable at first—just another highway cutting through Alabama’s Black Belt, where pine forests occasionally give way to scattered homes and rural crossroads. But this highway is paved with history. Here, civil rights icons Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis marched for voting rights in 1965. In Selma, where the highway transforms into broad city streets, state troopers violently assaulted peaceful demonstrators in the watershed moment known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Today, a new champion has emerged from the hallowed ground of Lowndes County: Catherine Coleman Flowers. At 66, Flowers presents a gentle demeanor that belies her formidable influence as an advocate for the forgotten communities of the Black Belt and rural America more broadly. While she began to gain recognition a decade ago for exposing the sewage crisis in the region—where untreated waste even today regularly bubbles up into yards and homes—her mission transcends basic sanitation. Flowers has led the charge in connecting environmental justice and climate change with deep-rooted social inequities. In doing so, she has elevated local struggles into a national conversation about whose communities deserve protection and dignity.

“What Catherine is trying to do is to open up a new conversation about what it means to look at these problems,” Bryan Stevenson, the acclaimed public-interest lawyer who runs the Equal Justice Initiative and who has worked with Flowers, told me.

But her strength comes from more than just her message. Flowers has an eye for pragmatism. Her work crosses political and ideological boundaries that can hold back other advocates, and she is willing to work with anyone sincere about helping those struggling in her neck of rural America. It’s a skill fit for these polarized times.