The Turkey Creek section of Gulfport, Mississippi, a predominantly African-American neighborhood of century-old shotgun houses and one-story cottages surrounded by pine forest and freshwater marsh, is a small place with a long history of what people today would call “environmental challenges.” In 1906, for example, the Gulf Coast Creosote Company constructed a wood processing plant directly adjacent to the wooded waterway that gives Turkey Creek its name. Eighty-two years later, in 1988, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shut down the plant and designated it a hazardous waste site under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, requiring the plant owners to take “corrective action” to treat, store, or dispose of toxic materials. In 1957, the state located a Mississippi Power coal plant less than two miles from Turkey Creek, at the convergence of Bayou Bernard and the Biloxi River. After a long struggle led by the NAACP, Sierra Club, and local grassroots groups, the plant burned its last piece of coal this April and switched to gas. During the Vietnam war, containment of a stockpile of Agent Orange at the Naval Construction Battalion Center in Gulfport was breached; the defoliant migrated from the site via the area’s deep storm ditches and contaminated the Turkey Creek basin. In 1982, a massive chemical explosion at the nearby Plastifax Corporation left behind a superfund site. “It lifted the entire house while I was on the living room floor playing Atari with my cousins,” Derrick Evans, a Turkey Creek native, environmental organizer, and civil rights educator, told me.

One subtler, but potentially more damaging, threat to the area stems from the convulsive expansion that Gulfport has undergone. This formerly sleepy seaside town has transformed itself in recent decades into an overbuilt, under-infrastructured, traffic-choked, gambling-boat-fueled, post-modern exurban object lesson. Turkey Creek has suffered more than most. The wetlands in and around the neighborhood have endured “progress,” as defined by the sprawling subdivisions, light industrial enterprises, strip malls, and bedroom communities that make up modern-day Gulfport. In 2001, the Mississippi Heritage Trust named Turkey Creek to its list of the state’s ten most endangered historic places. “Gulfport is a giant textbook of incompatible land use,” Evans said. “I mean, there’s a waste-water treatment facility in the middle of a city golf course.” (Gulfport South Wastewater Treatment Facility is situated in the Bayou Vista Golf Course, directly opposite the Gulfport-Biloxi International Airport.)

Perhaps the most tragic consequence of this unchecked development is increased flood vulnerability, all along the Gulf Coast, but felt most acutely in low-income African-American neighborhoods. “When I was a girl, the streets and ditches would fill up with water during storms, but the wetlands absorbed much of it,” Rose Johnson, a lifelong Gulfport resident and the first black president of the Mississippi Sierra Club, told me. “Wetlands are crucial for poor communities with aging sewer lines and drainage, no sidewalks, pollution from industrial plants, and other bad development.”

The damage wrought on Gulfport in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina represented a collection of the unpaid civic and social debts rung up during this extended period of irresponsible growth. The storm turned large swaths of this small coastal city into an inland sea. Floodwaters cut the roads and washed away bridges. Among the areas hardest hit by the 25-foot storm surge and flooding was Turkey Creek. More than half of the community’s 50 homes flooded to the rafters. The winds removed a dozen roofs.

The morning of the storm, Evans was in Boston, preparing lecture notes for the fall semester at Boston College, where he was an instructor. Evans has deep roots in Turkey Creek; his family descends from the original eight families of emancipated slaves that founded the settlement in 1866. He knows its history as it evolved through generations, from its origins in the brutal Reconstruction era, through the indignities and violence of state-sanctioned segregation, and into the more recent epoch of embedded bias and municipal disenfranchisement.