Augusta Is One Body: How Division Still Shapes the City

Deaconess Ruth Byllesby’s work in Augusta’s Harrisburg neighborhood offers a model of unity in a city shaped by division.

by Charles Rollins – Publisher

On a map, Augusta appears as a set of parts—distinct, legible, and seemingly self-contained. Summerville rises above the rest, geographically and historically, its tree-lined streets and institutional weight reflecting long-standing stability and accumulated capital. Its elevation is not merely physical. It is historical, economic, and cultural—a place shaped over generations by continuity, by investment, by the quiet accumulation of advantage that becomes, over time, indistinguishable from permanence.

Harrisburg, by contrast, sits lower: closer to the canal, closer to the river, closer to the physical and economic forces that shaped its existence. Its proximity is not incidental. It reflects a different relationship to the city: one tied to labor, to production, to the industries that once powered Augusta’s economy and left behind both infrastructure and vulnerability.

South Augusta stretches outward in a different direction still, industrial and infrastructural, where the geography itself begins to blur into corridors of production, logistics, and waste: rail lines, trucking routes, chemical plants, and the diffuse but unmistakable systems through which modern capitalism organizes its work.

This concentration is not incidental within the local landscape. Industrial corridors, transportation routes, and zoning decisions have combined over time to direct environmental burdens toward specific communities. When viewed alongside historical patterns of segregation and disinvestment, the distribution of pollution in Augusta becomes legible as structured rather than accidental.

Overlaying all of it are the clean lines of governance: commission districts, carefully drawn, formally equal, functionally divided. Districts structured to produce representation, to manage difference, to translate history into something administratively legible.

The map suggests clarity. But the map lies.

Air does not respect district boundaries. Water does not recognize zoning categories. Labor, capital, illness, and opportunity do not move in straight lines. They circulate. They accumulate. They cross every boundary that human beings impose.

Augusta is not a collection of parts. It is one body, not many parts. And like any body, what happens in one part does not stay there. It radiates. It compounds. It transforms the whole. The failure to recognize this—more precisely, the persistent refusal to organize life around it—is not a recent development. It is the central fact of Augusta’s history, and of American history more broadly. Not simply inequality, though inequality is everywhere visible. Not simply injustice, though injustice is measurable in every dataset. The deeper reality is fragmentation of the whole.

This is not theoretical in Augusta. It is visible in its neighborhoods, its industrial corridors, and the uneven distribution of risk and opportunity across its districts. The city itself makes the argument concrete.

Workers divided by race. Neighborhoods divided by policy. Movements divided by ideology. Responsibility divided across institutions designed to prevent coherence. Again and again, the same pattern emerges: separation weakens collective power while preserving systems that depend on that weakness. This is not accidental but structured. It is structural. And to understand how it operates in Augusta today—in its environmental disparities, its political debates, its uneven development—you have to begin much earlier than the twentieth century, but before we survey the missed opportunities of the past, I’d like to point out a remarkable example set by an underrecognized modern day saint right here in Augusta: Deaconess Ruth Byllesby.

Deaconess Ruth Byllesby, based out of Christ Church during the height of the Great depression and through the war years, worked in Harrisburg and showed us that an alternative is possible, and it’s based in fundamental Christian teachings that are too little emphasized in the world today. Her work reflects an alternative to the fragmentation of the whole described throughout this history. By addressing social, economic, and relational needs together, rather than in isolation, she embodied a model of community grounded in presence and mutual obligation. We need to find ways to break the cycle and make the kind of radical change that is so urgently needed both on a local and a national level.

The “Black Belt”

But before we can get to her story, we have to begin with land.

Long before redlining, before zoning codes, before municipal boundaries, the geography of inequality in the American South was already taking shape. The region known as the Black Belt—stretching in a wide arc across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and beyond—was named originally for its soil. Dark, fertile, unusually rich, it was ideal for cotton cultivation. That fact alone would have been enough to shape settlement patterns and economic development.

This pattern did not bypass Augusta; it helped shape it. Positioned within the broader plantation economy of the South, Augusta developed as a node of cotton trade and river-based commerce tied directly to enslaved labor. The demographic and economic patterns established in that period continue to echo in the city’s present-day geography.

But in the context of the early United States, it did something far more consequential. It made slavery profitable at scale. The soil did not simply support agriculture. It supported a system. Plantation agriculture took root in that soil. Enslaved labor followed. Wealth accumulated in particular places, and power followed wealth. Over time, the demographic composition of the region shifted as well, with large Black populations concentrated in precisely those areas where slavery had been most intensive. By the nineteenth century, the “Black Belt” no longer referred only to soil. It referred to people. And by the twentieth century, it referred increasingly to poverty. This is not coincidence. It is continuity.

If one overlays modern maps—income, health outcomes, environmental burden, educational attainment—the outline of the Black Belt reappears with striking consistency. The soil remains, but the system built upon it has evolved layer by layer, each new structure resting upon the last.

The origins of this fragmentation of the whole are not accidental but structured. They are embedded in the relationship between land, labor, and power. The Hebrew Scriptures understand this relationship with striking clarity. The laws of Jubilee, described in Leviticus 25, require that land be returned, debts forgiven, and systems of accumulation interrupted. “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity,” the text declares, “for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants” (Leviticus 25:23). This is a direct challenge to the logic of accumulation. Because accumulation produces division. And division produces inequality. And inequality, left unchecked, produces domination. The development of the American South followed a very different path.

The Black Belt’s fertile soil made cotton cultivation extraordinarily profitable. That profitability required labor. And that labor was supplied through slavery. This was not simply a moral failure. It was a system of production—a system that generated wealth, structured trade, and shaped political institutions. From the beginning, it depended on division. Not only the division between enslaved and free, but a broader set of distinctions—between white and Black, between landowner and laborer, between those who controlled production and those who sustained it.

This is not simply a warning about greed. It is a description of a system. A system in which accumulation displaces community. A system in which land, instead of sustaining life, becomes a mechanism for exclusion. Geography becomes history, and over time that history hardens into structure shaping lived reality. Augusta sits within this larger pattern—not at its most extreme point, but unmistakably shaped by the same logic. Land organizes labor. Labor generates wealth. Wealth structures power. Power reproduces the system.

Scripture recognized this dynamic long before modern sociology gave it language. “Woe to those who join house to house,” Isaiah writes, “who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you” (Isaiah 5:8). This is not simply a condemnation of greed. It is a description of accumulation as a system—a process through which land, wealth, and power concentrate, displacing others in the process. Division begins there. And once established, it does not remain confined to its origin.

The Civil War and Reconstruction

The Civil War disrupted this system, but it did not dismantle its logic. Lincoln’s confrontation with slavery was necessarily political and strategic, but it also revealed the depth of the structure that had developed. The abolition of slavery was a profound transformation. But the 13th Amendment’s exception—allowing involuntary servitude as punishment for crime—created a pathway for continuity.

The system changed form. It did not end. This is a pattern Scripture recognizes. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells a parable about a strong man whose house is plundered only when he is bound (Luke 11:21–22). The implication is clear: systems of power do not collapse on their own. They must be confronted at their root.

Reconstruction came close to such a confrontation. For a brief period, the possibility existed to reorder the system—to create a society in which land, labor, and power were structured differently. Black political participation expanded. Public institutions were created. There were attempts to build something more just. But that possibility was not sustained.

Reconstruction ended not because it failed naturally, but because it was abandoned., in what was even at the time called “the Corrupt Bargain” that settled the intense dispute over the election of 1876. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes promised to end reconstruction (which was supported by his party), after his Democratic opponent Samuel J. Tilden was only able to secure 184 electoral votes (1 short of a majority at the time), to Hayes’ 165, with the 20 votes from Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon disputed, in which resolution was attempted with a straight party line vote by Republicans, but was stopped by a filibuster that was resolved through that “Corrupt Bargain.” Again, elites quickly abandoned any pretense of fighting for the common good as soon as it was no longer expedient and profitable to do so, the “liberal Republicans” that had supported Lincoln and Grant based on a moral disgust with slavery were gone, and the modern Republican party was truly born.

Violence, political compromise, and economic calculation restored a system of division in new forms. Du Bois’s insight into this moment remains one of the most important ever written about American life. The “wages of whiteness” were not merely symbolic. They were a mechanism through which division was maintained. White workers were given status in place of equality, and that status was sufficient to prevent unity.

This is precisely the kind of dynamic the prophet Amos condemns: “They sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals… they trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth” (Amos 2:6–7). The language is ancient. The structure is familiar. In the years that followed, Southern states constructed legal systems designed to exploit it. Black Codes criminalized ordinary life. Vagrancy laws targeted those without formal employment. Arrest led to fines. Fines led to imprisonment. Imprisonment led to forced labor. Convict leasing emerged as a system through which prisoners were rented to private enterprises—mines, railroads, farms—under conditions often more brutal than slavery itself.

This was not a breakdown of the system. It was its continuation. Angela Davis has argued that this represents not metaphor but transformation: slavery reorganized under state authority. The locus of control shifted. The underlying relationship—extraction of labor through coercion—remained. The system adapted and persisted. The division persisted.

Ecclesiastes captures the continuity with unsettling clarity: “On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them.” Power remains. Forms change.

Following the Civil War, Reconstruction emerged as one of the most significant—and most misunderstood—moments in American history. For a brief period, the possibility existed to restructure the system itself. Black political participation expanded. Public education systems were created. There were attempts—limited but real—to alter the distribution of land and opportunity. It is difficult to overstate how radical this moment was. For a time, the United States came closer than it ever had to becoming something fundamentally different. And then it ended. Not because it failed naturally. But because it was undone.

Violence, political compromise, and economic calculation converged. Federal commitment waned. White supremacist structures reasserted themselves. The system returned—not to its previous form, but to a recognizable logic. Du Bois understood this. The “wages of whiteness” he described were not symbolic. They were structural. White workers were given status—relative position within the hierarchy—in place of material equality. That substitution was enough. It prevented unity. It ensured that those who might have challenged the system together remained divided within it.

By the late nineteenth century, the United States had entered a new phase of industrial capitalism, one in which the organization of labor became both more complex and more potentially powerful. Railroads connected regions, factories concentrated workers, and for the first time, large numbers of people found themselves engaged in similar forms of work under similar conditions. The possibility of collective action—of workers acting together across geography and occupation—was no longer theoretical. It was visible.

Labor Pushes Back, and a Pattern Emerges

The Pullman Strike of 1894 represents one of the clearest moments when that possibility came into view. The strike began with workers at the Pullman Company, but it quickly expanded. Under the leadership of Eugene Debs and the American Railway Union, it became a national movement, involving over 100,000 workers across multiple states. Rail traffic was disrupted. Economic pressure mounted. For a brief moment, it appeared that labor might act as a unified force capable of challenging corporate power on a national scale.

The dynamics that fractured solidarity during the Pullman Strike were reproduced in Augusta’s own industrial history. Mill villages like Harrisburg depended on tightly controlled labor systems where racial division shaped both opportunity and vulnerability. These divisions limited the possibility of unified worker action even as economic conditions worsened.

And then came the familiar pattern. At a critical moment, white workers considered whether to formally exclude Black workers from the union. The motion failed—by a razor-thin margin, reflecting how close workers came to choosing solidarity across racial lines. The margin matters because it reveals how close the system came to something different. It shows that division was not inevitable. But inclusion did not follow. Another near miss at an opportunity for real change, something that will repeat itself many times in this story.

Black workers remained marginalized, excluded in practice even if not in principle. They had fewer opportunities, less protection, and more immediate economic vulnerability. When the strike intensified, employers exploited that division. Black workers, denied access to union solidarity, were used as replacements. The strike fractured. Federal troops were deployed. The movement collapsed. The lesson is often framed as a moral one: racism weakened labor. But the deeper lesson is structural. Division prevented power.

Because power depends on coordination, and coordination depends on trust. It requires a recognition of shared interest that can overcome immediate differences. The system does not need to prevent all unity. It needs only to prevent enough of it. Even a single fracture is sufficient.

The story does not end there. In the decades that followed, Black Pullman porters would organize under A. Philip Randolph, forming the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—the first successful Black-led labor union recognized by a major corporation. Their success was hard-won. It took years of organizing, sacrifice, and persistence.

But what is most striking is not simply that they succeeded. It is that they had to build separately what might have been built together. Division did not eliminate resistance. It delayed it. And delay, over time, becomes a form of structural harm. To quote the great American Poet Langston Hughes:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

That pattern did not end with Pullman. It became embedded in American life, moving from the workplace into the landscape itself.

The New Deal era demonstrates how this logic evolved. Roosevelt’s policies represented a significant expansion of state intervention in the economy. Social Security, labor protections, public works—these programs reshaped American life and provided a degree of economic security that had not previously existed. But they were not universal, and not without strong pushback from both politicians, and particularly the Supreme Court.

To secure political support, particularly from Southern legislators, key programs excluded agricultural and domestic workers—categories that included a disproportionate number of Black Americans. Housing policy expanded access to credit, but through redlining, it directed that credit unevenly, reinforcing patterns of segregation.

The New Deal did not simply expand opportunity. It structured opportunity. In doing so, it preserved the divisions that had long defined American society. The removal of Henry Wallace as Roosevelt’s vice president underscores this point. Wallace represented a more expansive vision of economic democracy, one that might have pushed further toward structural change. His replacement marked a narrowing of that vision—a return to a framework that would manage inequality rather than eliminate it. This moment, like the vote in the Pullman strike, was another point in American history that could have created an opportunity for real change, but again, it was missed and is now hardly remembered at all.

What had been a division within labor became a division across space. And because space shapes everything—access to jobs, quality of housing, exposure to environmental hazards—the consequences deepened over time. Industrial facilities followed predictable logic. They were placed where land was cheaper, where resistance was weaker, and where political consequences were limited.

Harrisburg and History

The national story finds a particularly clear expression in Augusta. Harrisburg, once a thriving mill village, was built around the canal and the industries that depended on it. The canal itself, constructed in the nineteenth century, transformed Augusta into a regional industrial center. Textile mills lined its banks. Workers lived nearby. The geography of the neighborhood reflected the needs of production: proximity, density, efficiency. For a time, this system functioned. It provided employment. It structured community life. It tied the fate of the neighborhood to the fate of industry.

But when those industries declined—as textile manufacturing shifted, as economic patterns changed—the structure remained without the function that had sustained it. Jobs disappeared. Investment slowed. Infrastructure aged. Flooding risks, always present due to the neighborhood’s proximity to the canal and river, became more pronounced as maintenance lagged and resources shifted elsewhere. Harrisburg became a place where the past remained visible, but the future was uncertain. At the same time, industrial activity did not leave Augusta. It relocated.

South Augusta became the site of a new industrial geography, one defined not by mills but by chemical plants, battery manufacturing, logistics hubs, and transportation corridors. Facilities clustered in ways that reflected both economic logic and political reality: land was cheaper, resistance was weaker, and the existing structure of the city made it possible to concentrate industrial activity without direct challenge from more powerful constituencies.

Empirical data reinforces this pattern. Environmental datasets, including EPA ECHO facility records and local environmental equity mapping, show that regulated facilities and higher-emission sites are disproportionately concentrated in South Augusta and adjacent historically marginalized communities. When these datasets are layered against demographic and commission district maps, a consistent pattern emerges: areas with higher proportions of Black and lower-income residents experience greater proximity to regulated polluters and higher cumulative exposure risk. This distribution is not random. It reflects historical land use decisions, industrial siting practices, and political fragmentation of the whole that together channel environmental burdens into specific parts of the city. The result is a measurable alignment between historical exclusion, present-day governance boundaries, and environmental risk—further demonstrating that the geography of pollution in Augusta is structured rather than coincidental.

What emerges is not a random distribution of industry. It is a pattern. An industrial corridor.

Facilities such as Syensqo and U.S. Battery Manufacturing do not exist in isolation. They are part of a network of production and distribution that extends beyond the city but is grounded within it. Emissions do not remain confined to facility boundaries. They disperse into surrounding communities, into air and water systems, into bodies. Exposure becomes cumulative.

The Civil Rights Movement and Another Missed Opportunity

The Civil Rights Movement confronted these structures directly, but it also revealed their resilience. By the mid-twentieth century, legal segregation had become increasingly untenable. The movement achieved significant victories—Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. These were transformative changes, altering the legal framework of American life. But law does not automatically transform structure.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this clearly in his later years. His focus shifted from legal equality to economic justice, from civil rights to what he called the “beloved community”—a society organized around mutual recognition, shared responsibility, and material inclusion.

This was a different kind of challenge. It was not simply about access. It was about structure. And it proved more difficult. King’s assassination in 1968 marked not only the loss of a leader but the interruption of a broader project. The Poor People’s Campaign, which sought to unite people across racial lines around shared economic conditions, never reached its full potential.

Fred Hampton’s work in Chicago represented a similar attempt to build cross-racial solidarity among working-class communities. His Rainbow Coalition brought together Black, white, and Latino groups in a shared political project. He was assassinated by the FBI in 1969. Another near miss at an opportunity for real change, this time stopped directly by reactionary members of our own government.

Augusta experienced these dynamics not only through policy, but through conflict. In 1970, racial tensions erupted into what became known as the Augusta Riot. The immediate spark was the death of Charles Oatman, a Black teenager who died in the county jail under circumstances that authorities initially described as suspicious but not criminal. Community outrage spread quickly, fueled by long-standing grievances over policing, economic inequality, and political exclusion.

The unrest that followed was not random violence. It was an eruption from a community that had experienced decades of marginalization—economic, spatial, and political. Six Black men were killed by law enforcement during the response. The event left a lasting imprint on the city, not only in memory but in the way it revealed the depth of division that had been building beneath the surface. The riot did not resolve those divisions. In many ways, it reinforced them. It accelerated patterns of separation—social, economic, and geographic—that were already in place. It marked a moment when the city’s underlying fractures became impossible to ignore, even as the structures that produced them remained largely intact.

It also allowed another opportunity to divert attention from the real problem, by focusing on the momentary flash of violence, criticism is diverted from looking at the incredible violence done to those communities over a long period of time. It’s like focusing on the horrors of the depths of the French Revolution and pretending like the number of people killed in a couple of years is in any way comparable to the death and destruction propagated by the aristocracy of France over the prior thousand years.

This same divide and conquer mentality, and rule by technocratic elites was not confined to labor and race relations, but extended to almost every element of civil society, and was recognized as deeply problematic by researchers in a variety of fields, that show the same pattern.

By the time the modern environmental movement began to take shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Augusta—and cities like it—were already living with the consequences of decades of divided development. The environmental movement emerged out of legitimate and urgent concerns. Rivers were polluted. Air quality in industrial cities had become a public health crisis. There was growing recognition that unchecked industrial growth carried real costs.

At the same time, one of the most powerful labor organizations in the country, the United Auto Workers, saw clearly that environmental issues were not separate from economic ones. Under Walter Reuther, the UAW recognized that workers were exposed to pollution both on the job and in their communities. They supported environmental regulation and played a role in the early days of Earth Day. For a brief moment, there was the possibility of a unified movement—one that could demand clean air and water while also protecting workers’ livelihoods and reshaping industrial production. Then the UAW was excluded from the seminal conference in 1972 in Sweden where the modern environmental movement was “born”, another failure of elites to include the working class. The few members of the working class who tried to attend the summit were kept away from the global gathering by police with dogs. This would turn out to be yet another near miss on the path to actual change.

Environmentalism and labor diverged. Environmental organizations, often rooted in professional and elite circles, increasingly framed their work in regulatory and technical terms. Labor, facing economic pressures and job losses, came to see environmental regulation as a threat. The two movements, which might have reinforced one another, instead operated separately. Once again, division reduced pressure.

Industry adapted. Environmental policy developed within limits that did not fundamentally challenge patterns of production. Labor lost an opportunity to shape that policy in ways that aligned with worker interests. The possibility of structural change diminished.

The Foundation and Story of Neoliberalism and Reagonomics

These developments unfolded alongside broader changes in American economic policy. Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating through the 1980s under Ronald Reagan, a new framework emerged—one that emphasized deregulation, reduced government intervention, and the primacy of market solutions. What came to be known as Reaganomics reshaped the relationship between government, industry, and labor.

Taxes on corporations and higher-income individuals were reduced. Regulatory frameworks were loosened. Labor unions, already weakened by earlier divisions, faced additional pressure. The idea that markets, left to operate with minimal constraint, would produce optimal outcomes became a guiding assumption.

These policies did not disappear with the end of Reagan’s presidency. Variations of the same approach—often described as neoliberalism—were adopted, in different forms, by both major political parties. The emphasis on market-based solutions, public-private partnerships, and technocratic management of social problems became a common framework. By the late twentieth century, fragmentation of the whole had become more than a condition. It became a system. Neoliberalism is often described in terms of policy—deregulation, privatization, reduced taxation. But it is more accurately understood as a way of organizing society, one that breaks complex systems into discrete parts and assigns responsibility across them in ways that prevent unified response.

In Augusta, this fragmentation of the whole appears in the distribution of responsibility across agencies, boards, and jurisdictions. Decisions about development, zoning, and environmental regulation are dispersed in ways that make accountability difficult to trace. The result is not an absence of governance, but a form of governance that diffuses responsibility while maintaining existing patterns.

Labor becomes an employment issue. Environment becomes a regulatory issue. Health becomes an individual issue. Each is addressed separately. This is not inefficiency. It is function. Because a fragmented system cannot easily organize against itself.

The breaking of the PATCO strike in 1981 marked a decisive moment in this transition. Organized labor, already weakened, lost one of its most visible battles. Union membership declined. The capacity for collective action diminished. At the same time, industry continued to shift geographically, taking advantage of regions where division—racial, economic, political—was already embedded. The South, shaped by the long history already described, became central to this shift. The past became an asset. Division became a resource.

In Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber argues that economic systems are also moral systems. They define who is responsible, who owes what, and what constitutes a legitimate obligation. These definitions are not neutral. They are constructed in ways that reflect and reinforce existing power structures.

One of the most effective features of modern capitalism is the assignment of responsibility at the individual level. You are responsible for your debt. You are responsible for your employment. You are responsible for your environmental impact. This framing obscures the system. It transforms structural problems into personal ones. It also distorts politics and creates a system where people are structured as the ultimate arbiters of the fate of our environment, labor policy, debt, medical bills, and everything else. Every man is an island unto himself, and the best way to get ahead is to step on someone else’s back, climb up yourself, and then pull the ladder up behind you. This is not a system built with respect for humanity at its core.

Recycling provides a clear example of how this works in practice. Faced with growing environmental crisis driven by industrial production—particularly plastics—the response was framed in terms of individual behavior. Consumers were asked to recycle, to reduce, to make better choices. Meanwhile, production continued. The burden shifted. Responsibility was fragmented. The system remained intact.

Microplastics continue to destroy our ecosystem and increasingly concentrate in our food and genitals. Whether or not I put a plastic Coke bottle in the recycling bin doesn’t change things one bit (it’s not even recycled), but Coke and Pepsi switching back to aluminum and glass would make a real change. This is just burden shifting and externalization of the true costs of their product, and just like air pollution, it does not respect political boundaries or lines on a map.

Graeber’s critique extends further. In The Utopia of Rules, he describes how bureaucratic systems create the appearance of rational management while obscuring underlying power relationships. Procedures multiply. Accountability becomes diffuse. Decisions are made within structures that no single actor fully controls. This is not chaos; it is organization.

In practice, this often meant that structural issues were addressed indirectly. Environmental problems were managed through regulatory mechanisms that did not fundamentally alter production systems. Economic inequality was addressed through targeted programs rather than broader redistribution. Labor concerns were treated as separate from environmental and community concerns. The result was continuity. The underlying patterns of division—between labor and environment, between neighborhoods, between economic classes—remained largely intact.

In Augusta, these national trends intersect with local history in ways that are now visible on the ground. In South Augusta, particularly in and around the areas associated with ZIP code 30906, industrial facilities cluster in ways that stand apart from the rest of the city. Major polluters—including the chemical manufacturing operations historically associated with Solvay, now operating as Syensqo, and the U.S. Battery Manufacturing facility—sit within short distances of one another. These facilities report releases of chemicals linked to both immediate and long-term health risks.

They do not exist in isolation. They form a corridor—an industrial landscape embedded within residential areas. In some cases, major emitters are less than a mile apart. The cumulative effect is not theoretical. It is experienced. Overlay this with Augusta’s political map, and the pattern becomes more complex. The heaviest concentration of polluting facilities lies largely within District 3, a district structured to elect a white commissioner. Yet the neighborhoods most affected by those facilities are disproportionately Black and lower-income, and in many cases extend into adjacent Black-majority districts such as District 4.

Responsibility is fragmented. Accountability is difficult to locate.

At the same time, the effects of pollution do not remain confined. Fine particulate matter moves across district lines. Economic and public health consequences spread. The system remains interconnected, even as its burdens are unevenly distributed. A broader view of the city reveals a clear gradient. South Augusta—particularly Districts 3, 4, and parts of 5—carries the highest burden of industrial exposure. Moving westward into districts such as 6, 7, and 8, industrial facilities become sparse, air quality improves, and infrastructure reflects sustained investment.

The map of pollution begins to resemble the map of past exclusion.

And yet, as in earlier periods, the effects of division do not remain confined to those most directly affected. They shape the trajectory of the entire city—its economy, its public health, its capacity to grow and adapt.

These Policies are Part of a Larger Cultural and Political Structure

What becomes increasingly clear, when viewed alongside other traditions of critique, is that this pattern is not confined to race, or labor, or environment alone. It reflects something broader—a structure of domination that reproduces itself across different domains, appearing in different forms, but operating according to the same underlying logic.

Feminist thinkers have long recognized this. Writers such as bell hooks, Silvia Federici, and Nancy Fraser, building on earlier Marxist and Black feminist traditions, have argued that systems of gender domination do not simply subordinate women. They organize social life itself—shaping relationships, structuring expectations, and redistributing labor in ways that distort the conditions under which people live, work, and understand one another.

What is often described, in more popular language, as “toxic masculinity” is not, in this tradition, a matter of individual failure. It is a structural condition. It names a set of expectations—control, emotional suppression, dominance, independence—that are imposed not only on those excluded from power, but on those who are expected to embody it. Men, within such a system, may possess relative advantage. They may have greater access to authority or recognition. But that advantage is inseparable from constraint. Their emotional lives are narrowed. Their relationships are shaped by hierarchy rather than mutuality. Their identities are tied to performance—strength, control, self-sufficiency—in ways that are often isolating and ultimately unsustainable.

The system appears to benefit them. But it does so by diminishing them.

Federici’s work makes clear that this is not incidental to the development of modern capitalism. The disciplining of women’s labor and bodies, the enclosure of land, and the rise of wage labor were not separate processes. They unfolded together, each reinforcing the other. Control over reproduction, over domestic labor, over the boundaries between public and private life—these were not secondary concerns. They were central to the organization of a system that required not only the extraction of labor, but the reproduction of the conditions under which that extraction could continue.

Fraser extends this insight by showing how capitalism depends on what it refuses to fully acknowledge: the labor that sustains life itself. Caregiving, education, the maintenance of households and communities—this work is essential, but it is often rendered invisible or devalued. Costs are displaced. Responsibility is shifted. What appears efficient is, in fact, subsidized by forms of labor that remain unrecognized.

The pattern should now feel familiar. Division. Reassignment. Obscuring of structure.

It also expresses itself in the continued existence of involuntary servitude in America. In Georgia, including regions surrounding Augusta, convict leasing became a central mechanism for maintaining coerced labor after Reconstruction. The same rail and industrial systems that once depended on enslaved labor adapted to this new form of control. Augusta’s development as a transportation and industrial hub reflects this continuity between past and present labor systems.

The persistence of coerced labor after the formal abolition of slavery is not simply an unfortunate historical footnote. It is, as Angela Davis has argued, evidence of a deeper continuity—one in which systems of punishment, labor, and racial control are repeatedly reorganized rather than eliminated. In Are Prisons Obsolete? and Women, Race & Class, Davis traces how the prison system emerges not as a neutral institution, but as a structure that absorbs and extends earlier forms of racialized labor discipline.

This is not merely continuity in form, but continuity in function. The criminalization of Black life in the post-Reconstruction South created a steady supply of labor that could be coerced under the 13th Amendment’s exception clause. Petty infractions became gateways into forced labor systems tied directly to private industry. The line between punishment and production blurred.

Davis’s insight is that this system is not a deviation from capitalism but one of its mechanisms. The prison becomes a site of labor extraction and social management. Over time, what she calls the prison-industrial complex emerges, linking state power, private capital, and social control.

Mass incarceration fragments the working class. It removes millions from collective economic action and transforms structural problems into individual criminality, obscuring their causes. As Howard Zinn observed, systems of control depend on preventing unity among those who share interests. The prison system fuses law and race into a mechanism of division.

The effects do not remain confined. Communities experience instability, labor markets are distorted, and public resources shift toward policing rather than development. Theologically, if the community is one body, not many parts, then a system that removes and exploits part of that body cannot be neutral. It represents a breaking of relationship that reverberates through the whole.

What mass incarceration reveals is the persistence of a system that manages division rather than overcoming it, adapting rather than transforming—and continuing to depend on fragmentation of the whole to endure.

Today, Georgia’s high incarceration rates and the role of regional jails and probation systems make this structure visible in places like Augusta. Communities in and around Richmond County experience the cumulative effects of incarceration through disrupted families, constrained labor markets, and diminished civic participation. The system Davis describes is not abstract—it is operating locally.

Just as the “wages of whiteness” offered white workers a form of status in place of material equality, patriarchal systems offer men a form of dominance in place of genuine wellbeing. Just as racial division weakened labor movements by preventing solidarity, gendered divisions organize households and communities in ways that limit collective action. Just as environmental harm is concentrated in particular places while its causes are diffused, the labor that sustains life is hidden even as it becomes more essential. The over-policing of Black people and Black neighborhoods has not only directly and materially harmed the direct victims, but also the legal arguments built to support that structure have been turned ever more into tools of State control over all of its citizens, regardless of their race. The depravities of Trump’s immigration enforcement demonstrate these harms in very concrete way that many Americans are only just now noticing.

In each case, the system produces a form of advantage. And in each case, that advantage is bound to a deeper loss.

This Is Not a Problem That Can Be Solved By Individual Action

This is why the claim that such systems harm everyone—while often resisted—is not rhetorical. It is structural. Working-class white communities in Augusta, like men within patriarchal systems, may experience forms of relative insulation. They may avoid the most immediate and concentrated harms. But they remain embedded within the same structure. They experience economic precarity, weakened labor power, fragmented political life, and a diminished capacity for collective action. They are positioned differently within the system, but they are not outside it.

Theologically, this is not difficult to understand. If the community is one body, not many parts, then a system that organizes that body through domination, hierarchy, and unequal valuation cannot be reconciled with that vision. “The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable,” Paul writes (1 Corinthians 12:22), overturning precisely the logic that assigns worth according to power. The prophetic tradition speaks in similar terms—not only condemning injustice, but exposing the structures that sustain it, the accumulation that displaces, the exploitation that hides itself within ordinary life.

Seen in this light, the connections traced throughout this essay—between race, labor, environment, and gender—are not incidental. They are expressions of the same logic. A logic that fragments what is whole, assigns value unevenly, and sustains itself through division. A logic that is in direct contradiction to Christ’s mandate to the world: love the Lord your God and treat others as you would like to be treated. This is not a complex concept, I’ve been teaching it to children in Sunday School successfully for years, and it is amazing how an adult can overcomplicate something that is so clear to a small child.

And it is this logic, more than any single policy or institution, that must be confronted if anything like the wholeness described in Scripture—and glimpsed, however briefly, in moments of solidarity— is to be made real.

In Augusta, these dynamics are visible in the uneven distribution of caregiving burdens and economic insecurity across neighborhoods. Households absorb costs that are not accounted for in formal economic measures, particularly in lower-income areas. These patterns reinforce the same broader system of fragmentation of the whole and hidden labor described throughout this essay.

A system that requires emotional suppression, that equates power with control, that limits acceptable forms of vulnerability produces distortion. It produces isolation. It produces instability. Men within such a system may hold relative advantage. But they are constrained by it. Their relationships are limited. Their emotional lives are narrowed. Their wellbeing is diminished. The system appears to benefit them. It ultimately harms them.

The same dynamic applies here. White communities in Augusta may experience relative insulation from the most concentrated environmental burdens. But they are not outside the system. They are within it. They experience the broader effects: Economic instability. Weakened labor power. Fragmented political life. Infrastructure strain. Public health costs. The system produces relative advantage. But it undermines collective wellbeing.

A Radically Different Approach, Modeled on the Wisdom of Jesus Christ

Christ offered a radically different path as an example that humanity has never lived up to. He did not spend his time on earth sitting in a seat of power, telling the government how to better order its affairs to produce a slightly better material life for the people, but instead spent his time among the people. He lived with them, slept in their homes, ate with them, wanted to know them, and genuinely cared about human connection and our relationships with each other and God.

Working through Christ Church, Deaconess Ruth Byllesby served mill families in Harrisburg at a time when the connections between labor, housing, and health were immediate and unavoidable. Her work did not divide these concerns into separate categories. She recognized that they were part of a single reality.

The Reverend Harry Maloney, Rector of Christ Church in 1978, wrote the following: “I am amazed how she changed people and became a lasting influence in their lives. I am told she shared all she had of material wealth whatever that amounted to, with the people she ministered to but also she gave of herself so willingly and with so much love. It was this great love and compassion for people that caused her to be remembered.”

The building where she worked now houses the Byllesby Center. The structure remains, but more importantly, so does the model of engagement it represents—one grounded in presence, in relationship, and in an understanding that problems cannot be addressed in isolation from the lives in which they are embedded. This reflects a deeper theological claim. Christianity does not begin with separation. It begins with unity. The image of the body, central to the Apostle Paul’s writing, is not simply metaphorical. It is a statement about how human life is structured. “If one member suffers,” Paul writes, “all suffer together.” This does not mean that suffering is experienced equally. It means that it is shared in a way that cannot be avoided.

Augusta’s history shows what happens when that reality is ignored. The Pullman Strike demonstrates how division weakens collective power. Redlining shows how division can be embedded in the landscape. The Augusta Riot reveals how those divisions can erupt when pressure builds. The clustering of industrial facilities in South Augusta shows how those patterns persist in physical form. The separation of labor and environmental movements, and the policy frameworks that followed, illustrate how even well-intentioned efforts can fall short when they operate in isolation.

But the history also shows something else. It shows that division is not inevitable. It shows moments—sometimes narrow, sometimes fleeting—when another path was possible. It shows institutions and individuals who acted on the assumption that connection matters. The question for Augusta now is not whether the divisions exist. They do. They are visible in the map, in the data, in the lived experience of its residents. The question is whether the city will continue to organize itself around those divisions, or whether it will begin to act on the reality that underlies them. Because the truth, however difficult, is that Augusta, and America, is one body, not many parts. Its air is shared. Its economy is shared. Its future is shared. And until it begins to act like it, the problems it faces—environmental injustice, economic inequality, the pressures of a changing climate, rising debt, insurmountable medical bills, and an ever more expensive path to a quality of life that most American’s used to take for granted—will remain not just unsolved, but structurally unsolvable.

Conclusion

The structure is now visible: From the soil of the Black Belt to the mills of Harrisburg. From slavery to convict leasing to mass incarceration. From Reconstruction to the New Deal to neoliberalism. From labor movements to environmental policy. From national history to Augusta’s present geography.

The same logic appears, and follows a clear pattern: Division. Fragmentation. Adaptation. Persistence.

But Scripture offers another logic: Wholeness. Connection. Mutual obligation. One body.

In a way, the entire Bible can be understood as a lengthy mediation on the question: “Am I my brother’s keeper, and if I am, who counts as my brother?” In Christian theology, these questions were answered in a very clear and unambiguous way: “Yes, you are, and literally every human being on the planet is your brother.”

Augusta, and American as a whole, is already one body, not many parts. The question is whether it will be recognized as such. Because until it is, the problems that define the city—environmental injustice, economic inequality, mass-incarceration, political fragmentation of the whole, will remain not only unresolved, but structurally unsolvable.

And if it is recognized if the connections that already exist are acknowledged and acted upon, then what has been divided can be joined. And what is joined can act. Not as parts. But as a whole.

Together.

Sources and Related Links:

https://www.savannahriverkeeper.org/augusta-at-risk.html

https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fecho.epa.gov%2Ffiles%2Fdata%2FData_Download_ECHO_3_27_2026_69c6fe6d76134.xlsx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK

https://echo.epa.gov/resources/echo-data/about-the-data

https://richmondfreepress.com/news/2024/may/02/report-exposes-racial-disparities-workplace-safety/

https://citygrades.com/georgia/augusta/

https://aflcio.org/about/history/labor-history-events/atlanta-washerwomen-strike

https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/consultants

https://www.pullman-museum.org/labor/

https://resources.newamericanhistory.org/redlining-environmental-inequalities

https://www.proquest.com/docview/2829877715?pq-origsite=primo&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals