NEWTOWN FLORIST CLUB Gainesville, Florida
Story and Photos By Mary Jo McConahay

In the 1950s housewives in the African American neighborhood of Gainesville, Georgia, started a social service club to collect money for funeral wreaths. Eventually the question loomed: "Why are so many of us dying?" Over the years the women of the Newtown Florist Club, located in a neighborhood described as "an industrial fallout zone," have become a force for environmental justice and against racism through legal challenges, lobbying, media coverage, and testing of toxic levels. Youngsters are being groomed as the next generation of grassroots leaders. Members still attend funerals together in community solidarity, bearing roses, wearing crisp white in summer, black in winter.

The towers of a dog food processing mill loom above the children's playground, and backyards butt up against a scrap metal operation where machines crush cars, refrigerators, and smelly metal holding tanks. Factories chug and whirr, churning out chicken feed, hair spray, and chemically treated wood—they are closer to the neighborhood than schools. Park your car a few hours; you may return to find pale yellow grain dust covering it like a shroud.

"We got to talk about it," says Mozetta Whelchel, 77. She sits in an easy chair. Her sister Faye Bush, 67, lovingly runs a hand over Mozetta's head—hair is just beginning to grow in after an operation to remove a cancerous brain tumor. Mozetta's home, like the others on the quiet streets of Newtown, was built in the late 1930s to house the town's blacks after a killer tornado ripped through Gainesville. Many here blame sickness on the very air they breathe.

"No other person not of our race is going to come forward for us," says Faye, gently but plainly. "You have to do it yourself." Years after the African American homeowners had established their community, factories moved in. Today other parts of Gainesville are free of what is called "light industry." Northside residential neighborhoods unfold in quiet single-story homes or brick mansions, set on leafy lots that smell of honeysuckle, with no community-wide extraordinary health problems. The families of southside Newtown, meanwhile, suffer from lupus, an immune system disorder, and cancers, significantly out of proportion to their numbers. Soil and water runoff, they believe, has been contaminated over the years by industries which outsiders invited into their neighborhood.

For years, no one listened to their concerns.

Visible through an open bedroom door is a picture of Mozetta's daughter Moselee, hair upswept, a smile on her young face, dead at age 16 in the 1980s, from lupus. "She acted like she had the flu, that's what I thought it was at first," recalls Mozetta. "Later you could just see the water on her joints, swollen up." Soon "the butterfly," a distinctive facial mark that can signal lupus, appeared on the face of Mozetta's son too, who died within a year of his high school graduation. Neighbors and even some who moved away, tracked down by the Florist Club, have lupus and other suspicious cancers.

When Mae Catherine Wilmont of Elm Street, now 58, was diagnosed in 1991, she joined the Florist Club. "I knew there was strength in numbers," says the licensed practical nurse who had to quit her hospital job and now babysits "for people of wealth."

Faye Bush, whose mother was a founder and who serves today as the club's executive director, moves from phone to phone in a small Desota street house conducting club business. Their work has grown far beyond flowers, even beyond environmental activism. The Florist Club championed the neighborhood's youth as far back as the civil rights era when integration was declared, but equality for black students was slow in coming. It is developing a land trust to buy neighborhood houses which come up for sale. Better to find low-income buyers than let the houses fall into the hands of outsiders and even drug tenants, which is already beginning to happen.

In many ways the club is the only show in town. Black residents regard it as the one place their voices might be heard.

On a typical day, a woman drops by to seek counsel about a cop who gave her son a ticket "for walking" in another neighborhood the previous night—she smells discrimination. A pair of members sits at a plastic-covered table, talking of strategy to fight a four-lane highway planned to run through Newtown. Faye Bush, who has lupus herself, seems intent, even in a rush, to guarantee that the Florist Club will endure another 50 years. She beams as girls who attended last summer's leadership class drop by for a meeting with 29-year-old Tabatha Jackson, recently hired to work with the club's youth wing.

"These factories ought to stop letting out the gas that's not good for your breathing, or move on out to another part of the city," says a girl named Darishone Ellison. "They're here because this is the—what do you call it—the lower level of the town, not as important. But anyplace people live is important."

Darishone's friend, Natkrysha McGarity, who also attended the workshop for developing future leaders, already seems to have taken on the activist face of the Florist Club. "If it's just one person they won't listen to you, but if there's lots, they will."

Faye Bush has stepped out to the kitchen for a moment. She returns with a birthday cake, pink candles blazing. She has remembered, and puts it down in front of Natkrysha, who makes a wish. The girl is 14 today.