tl/dr: Industrial shyt has been concentrated in Black communities (regardless of income level) for over 100 years and it's having dire effects on long-term health outcomes. Some Black folk are fighting back.
When Kilynn Johnson walks out the door of the house her parents bought in 1972, where she grew up and lives to this day, she steps into the warm embrace of a community where neighbors feel more like kin. Her home sits across the street from Stinger Square Park, where Johnson passed long days of her childhood playing alongside her siblings and cousins and friends. But by age 8, diagnosed with asthma, she spent more time sitting on the sidelines, watching the other children tumble on playground equipment or rip and run through the park. Once in a while a neighbor, Ms. Sylvia or any number of Black mother figures whom Johnson and everyone knew never to call by just their first names, might come by and check on her. “You doing all right, Kilynn?” they would ask the quiet little girl.
Near the end of 2015, Johnson felt short of breath and wondered whether the asthma that plagued her when she was a child had flared up once again. By the last week of December, she was able to leave her house on the corner of dikkinson Street and South 32nd Street, in the Grays Ferry neighborhood of South Philadelphia, only once, to drag herself to church on New Year’s Eve. Three nights later, she began vomiting uncontrollably. At sunrise, she managed to call her former partner, Tony, and could get out only one word: “Hospital.”
Several hours and a battery of tests later, doctors at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill from Grays Ferry, told Johnson that she needed surgery to remove a tumor from her gallbladder — but that she was also suffering from such a severe infection that she would require IV antibiotics and a week in intensive care before doctors could operate. The surgery revealed gallbladder cancer that had spread; the doctors removed her gallbladder, seven lymph nodes and part of her liver. She needed six weeks of both radiation and chemotherapy. “They didn’t know if I was going to make it,” Johnson said.
Shy and reserved by nature, Johnson was slow to tell anyone about the cancer. “I held it to myself,” Johnson recalls. “In the beginning it was private, so I preferred to open up a little at a time.” One day in the spring of 2016, Johnson went out for some fresh air. Leaning heavily on a walker, she passed the familiar rowhouses on dikkinson Street. As she made her way with the walker, she met Sylvia Bennett, whom Johnson still called Ms. Sylvia, and who lived three doors down on the same block.
Bennett, 76, a retired behavioral-health specialist, had raised five children in the tight-knit community of Grays Ferry. Bennett’s youngest daughter was just a little older than Kilynn Johnson; Ms. Sylvia had watched Johnson grow up and raise a family of her own. Now, observing her frail neighbor and the walker, she asked Johnson in her most gentle voice: “Where you been? Haven’t seen you for a while.” “I think I told her, ‘I been sick,’” Johnson says, recalling her reticence. Bennett knew not to pry. This went on for months, until the summer day when Bennett asked, “How you doing?” and Johnson told her, “Ms. Sylvia, I have cancer.”
After she recovered from the initial shock of her diagnosis, Johnson began to wonder why she had such an unusual cancer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only about 3,700 Americans find out they have gallbladder cancer each year; breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in the country, with more than 276,000 new cases annually. Because Johnson’s disease was so uncommon, doctors at University Hospital had to formulate a special treatment plan. Gallbladder cancer occurs mainly in older people, and 72 is the average age at diagnosis. Johnson was 46. “I started thinking, What was I doing with this?”
Bennett had an answer for her. “Look across the highway,” she said, pointing toward the massive 150-year-old refinery, owned by Philadelphia Energy Solutions since 2012, that was so familiar to Grays Ferry residents that it seemed like part of the landscape.
Over the next year, Bennett and Johnson began to tally the diseases all around them suffered by the people they loved. Johnson’s father’s brother, her uncle Robert, who also lived in the neighborhood, died of prostate cancer in 2010, and three of his children, Kilynn’s first cousins, had also had different forms of cancer — four out of six people in one household. Those three cousins learned they had cancer earlier than age 66, the average age of a diagnosis. Bennett’s daughters Ladeania and Wanda, found out they had breast cancer several months apart and when they were both in their 50s; Wanda then came down with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. “And now me,” Johnson said.
Between the two of them, Johnson and Bennett knew two dozen family members, friends and neighbors, a number of them under 50, who’d had cancer. As they tallied their sick and their dead, the two women wondered, “What we gonna do?”
When Kilynn Johnson walks out the door of the house her parents bought in 1972, where she grew up and lives to this day, she steps into the warm embrace of a community where neighbors feel more like kin. Her home sits across the street from Stinger Square Park, where Johnson passed long days of her childhood playing alongside her siblings and cousins and friends. But by age 8, diagnosed with asthma, she spent more time sitting on the sidelines, watching the other children tumble on playground equipment or rip and run through the park. Once in a while a neighbor, Ms. Sylvia or any number of Black mother figures whom Johnson and everyone knew never to call by just their first names, might come by and check on her. “You doing all right, Kilynn?” they would ask the quiet little girl.
Near the end of 2015, Johnson felt short of breath and wondered whether the asthma that plagued her when she was a child had flared up once again. By the last week of December, she was able to leave her house on the corner of dikkinson Street and South 32nd Street, in the Grays Ferry neighborhood of South Philadelphia, only once, to drag herself to church on New Year’s Eve. Three nights later, she began vomiting uncontrollably. At sunrise, she managed to call her former partner, Tony, and could get out only one word: “Hospital.”
Several hours and a battery of tests later, doctors at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in West Philadelphia, across the Schuylkill from Grays Ferry, told Johnson that she needed surgery to remove a tumor from her gallbladder — but that she was also suffering from such a severe infection that she would require IV antibiotics and a week in intensive care before doctors could operate. The surgery revealed gallbladder cancer that had spread; the doctors removed her gallbladder, seven lymph nodes and part of her liver. She needed six weeks of both radiation and chemotherapy. “They didn’t know if I was going to make it,” Johnson said.
Shy and reserved by nature, Johnson was slow to tell anyone about the cancer. “I held it to myself,” Johnson recalls. “In the beginning it was private, so I preferred to open up a little at a time.” One day in the spring of 2016, Johnson went out for some fresh air. Leaning heavily on a walker, she passed the familiar rowhouses on dikkinson Street. As she made her way with the walker, she met Sylvia Bennett, whom Johnson still called Ms. Sylvia, and who lived three doors down on the same block.
Bennett, 76, a retired behavioral-health specialist, had raised five children in the tight-knit community of Grays Ferry. Bennett’s youngest daughter was just a little older than Kilynn Johnson; Ms. Sylvia had watched Johnson grow up and raise a family of her own. Now, observing her frail neighbor and the walker, she asked Johnson in her most gentle voice: “Where you been? Haven’t seen you for a while.” “I think I told her, ‘I been sick,’” Johnson says, recalling her reticence. Bennett knew not to pry. This went on for months, until the summer day when Bennett asked, “How you doing?” and Johnson told her, “Ms. Sylvia, I have cancer.”
After she recovered from the initial shock of her diagnosis, Johnson began to wonder why she had such an unusual cancer. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only about 3,700 Americans find out they have gallbladder cancer each year; breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in the country, with more than 276,000 new cases annually. Because Johnson’s disease was so uncommon, doctors at University Hospital had to formulate a special treatment plan. Gallbladder cancer occurs mainly in older people, and 72 is the average age at diagnosis. Johnson was 46. “I started thinking, What was I doing with this?”
Bennett had an answer for her. “Look across the highway,” she said, pointing toward the massive 150-year-old refinery, owned by Philadelphia Energy Solutions since 2012, that was so familiar to Grays Ferry residents that it seemed like part of the landscape.
Over the next year, Bennett and Johnson began to tally the diseases all around them suffered by the people they loved. Johnson’s father’s brother, her uncle Robert, who also lived in the neighborhood, died of prostate cancer in 2010, and three of his children, Kilynn’s first cousins, had also had different forms of cancer — four out of six people in one household. Those three cousins learned they had cancer earlier than age 66, the average age of a diagnosis. Bennett’s daughters Ladeania and Wanda, found out they had breast cancer several months apart and when they were both in their 50s; Wanda then came down with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood. “And now me,” Johnson said.
Between the two of them, Johnson and Bennett knew two dozen family members, friends and neighbors, a number of them under 50, who’d had cancer. As they tallied their sick and their dead, the two women wondered, “What we gonna do?”