Or rather, one of the river’s many oil slicks caught on fire. It is believed that the fire was caused when pieces of oil slicked debris were ignited by sparks from a passing train. No known photos exist of the 1969 fire, which burned for just under 30 minutes and caused about $50,000 in damage to local railroad bridges. In fact, the famous image used in the Time article that many associate with the 1969 fire was from the earlier much more dramatic 1952 fire, although it was still the Cuyahoga. Exaggeration aside, that article lightlighted an important issue. The sewers of Cleveland and the many manufacturing plants along the river banks were polluting the river to an astonishing degree. Partially as a result of that article and follow-up news coverage, the 1969 river fire became a symbol for the environmental movement and the problems brought about by America’s industrialization but only in the years after the fire.

The Cuyahoga caught fire many, many other times before the 1969 fire but never received national attention before then. As the Smithsonian found, it caught fire in 1868, 1883, 1887, 1912, 1922, 1936, 1941, and 1948. It is most likely the river caught fire several other times as well, and we don’t know about those incidents due to the poor record-keeping of the times. Cleveland wasn’t even the only major city of the time to have a river catch fire. Baltimore, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Buffalo, and Galveston all took special measures to prevent fires on their own rivers.

So why was no one doing anything about America’s river pollution before 1969? Well, they were. The Water Pollution Control Act of 1965 had already become national law. As our National Park Service notes, Cleveland itself had passed a $100 million bond issue in 1968 for sewer construction and water treatment plant upgrades. Until the story gained national attention, the fire was seen by locals as more of a symbol of the progress that had been made and how far there still was to go. Remember, the 1969 fire was still far less catastrophic than previous ones. In fact, the 1952 fire caused around $1.5 million in damages to the city, which is equivalent to over $16 million in 2022’s money.

In fact, the mayor of Cleveland at the time was a major reason why that $100 million bond was approved, he worked for that and throughout his career advocated for what we now refer to as environmental justice. That mayor, Carl B. Stokes, was also the first black mayor of Cleveland and one of the first black mayors elected in a major U.S. city. (He was the first elected black mayor elected to take office. Richard G. Hatcher in Gary, Indiana was elected first but took office after Stokes, and the first black mayor of any major city, that being Walter Washington in Washington D.C., was appointed to the position.) Having served in the Ohio House of Representatives previously and having had an unsuccessful bid for mayor in 1965, his 1967 victory made him a national figure. A massive part of his campaign was urban revitalization, which included cleaner water in the city. Again, even before the 1969 fire, Mayor Stokes was focused on local actions to improve Cleveland’s water quality. It was one of his signature issues.

On June 23, the day after the fire, Mayor Stokes organized a local press tour. They visited the location of the fire, an industrial site, and sewers that contributed to the pollution. During the tour, he argued that because Cleveland had no power to regulate pollution in its suburbs, and because the river flowed through many places outside of Cleveland’s control before reaching Cleveland, local actions were not enough. The Cuyahoga River would never be clean without cooperation between the federal and state government.

Attending this press conference was a reporter by the name of Betty Kalric, who was one of the nation’s first full-time environmental reporters. She had been covering water clean-up efforts around Lake Erie for years prior to the 1969 fire. Her coverage of the conference for the Cleveland Press was picked up by other national magazines. The conference was also a main focus of the famous Times article, propelling Mayor Stokes, and the fire, further into the national spotlight, which in turn drove public awareness of issues like unregulated chemical waste disposal.

From there, the narrative is that, motivated by both the fire and an oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson organized “teach-in” protests on college campuses across the U.S. in a bid to convince the federal government that the planet was in danger. The day of these protests? April 22, 1970. The protests spread like wildfire, pardon the pun. According to Nelson, “Earth Day worked because of the spontaneous response at the grassroots level. We had neither the time nor resources to organize 20 million demonstrators and the thousands of schools and local communities that participated. That was the remarkable thing about Earth Day. It organized itself.”

On the first Earth Day, rallies were held across the nation. A portion of Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed off to traffic for several hours as a result. Congress went into recess so its members could listen and speak to their constituents at various Earth Day events. The first Earth Day marked a change in public opinion, and throughout the seventies, several environmental reforms were passed, two of which are commonly linked to the 1969 Cuyahoga fire, that being the Clean Water Act and the 1970 formation of the EPA. Several other key acts were passed as a result of the Earth Day movement, such as the Endangered Species act. Public polls from 1971 indicated a 2,500% increase in Americans who believed protecting the environment was an important goal.

Since then, Earth Day celebrations have grown immensely. It went global in 1990, and is now celebrated in over 140 nations. Sometimes the holiday is extended into a full Earth Week. The United Nations celebrates its own Earth Day on the vernal equinox. And the 1969 river fire was not only one of the reasons people started to care enough to get involved with Earth Day rallies, but a reason the creators of Earth Day created Earth Day.

The 1969 fire became a symbol mainly because the people who were already key figures in the environmentalism movement made it so. Not just Carl Stokes or Senator Nelson, and certainly not just Time magazine, although they did play a large part. One could argue a key reason Carl Stokes was elected mayor was due to his media savviness and charisma. He certainly used that to his advantage to aid his campaign for environmental justice on a national level. But he was not alone in this. His brother, Louis Stokes, was also an important figure in the movement. In 1969, Louis Stokes was elected to the United States House of Representatives, becoming the first black Congressmen elected in Ohio, and he used that position to help secure federal funding for clean-up efforts on the Cuyahoga River.

Of course, some luck played into this. The issue in which Time published their article on the fire contained stories about the Apollo 11 moon landing, and the cover story was the Chappaquiddick incident. Given Time's dramatic choice of imagery for the fire, is it any wonder it became such a galvanizing symbol? And while the photo was attention-grabbing on its own, the article’s textual points were even more dramatic, and more importantly, true. The vivid language used to describe the river’s appearance was one thing, the fact that “not even low forms such as leeches and sludge worms that usually thrive on wastes” could be found in the river was another. The Times article also highlighted the effects of unregulated dumping on other rivers that passed through big cities, including the Potomac in Washington D.C.

This press coverage ultimately led up to Mayor Stokes testifying before the Senate about Cleveland’s water pollution in 1970. By then he had a larger argument than just cleaning up Cuyahoga. He argued that pollution was connected to general quality-of-life and health issues in urban areas. During his testimony, he stated in no uncertain terms that “We have the kind of air and water-pollution problems in these cities that are every bit as dangerous to the health and safety of our citizens as any intercontinental ballistic missiles that’s so dramatically poised 5,000 miles from our country.”

And the federal funding Congressmen Stokes helped secure? That laid the groundwork for revisions to old legislation that in 1972 became the Clean Water Act. That same year, Ohio established a state-run EPA, which became the model for similar agencies across the states.

While it is true that the 1969 fire helped sway public opinion, a lot of the social change attributed to the fire’s symbolic meaning was already well underway, due to the efforts of the Stokes brothers and many others, not ot mention the fire was made out by the media to be more extreme than it actually was. Cleveland already had clean-up efforts in-progress. The Cuyahoga River and Cleveland as a whole have come a long way since the pollution of the past. By 1989 insects and mollusks had reappeared in the river. In 2019, the EPA declared it safe to eat fish from the river. Today, people regularly fish and kayak along the river.

But it has not been without setbacks. In 2020, the river caught fire again, a little over 51 years after the last one. This fire was caused when a crashed fuel tanker spilled its flaming contents into a storm drain. Due to heavy rains, that fire then made its way to the river, where it blazed for around five minutes. Other aspects of the Stokes’s legacy have been undone. The Trump administration made changes to the Clean Water Act that, on top of restricting the ability of state governments to regulate their own waters, removed protections from 60% of streams in this country.

Still, pollution clean-up and environmental regulations in this nation have come a long way since the first Earth Day. The Cuyahoga is a remarkable example of that improvement. It has met nearly all of the goals for its recovery established by the Clean Water Act. There’s still a lot of progress to be made nationwide, but if there’s one thing to learn from history, it’s that we can make that progress.

On March 28, 2022, Florida Governor Ron Desantis signed into law Florida House Bill 1557, aka the Parental Rights in Education Bill, or as critics refer to it, the "Don't Say Gay” bill.

The law is scheduled to take effect July 1, 2022. You can read the text of the bill for yourself here.

This bill, or law, rather, has drawn heavy criticism from teachers, activists, and even the White House. President Biden tweeted about the bill back in February, in March his administration met with members of the LGBT community in Florida to speak to them about how the bill would affect them, and just two weeks ago, on April 21, commented on a related action by the Florida legislators at a Seattle fundraiser.

Due to Disney’s criticism of the Parental Rights in Education Law, a bill has been drafted to dissolve Disney’s special district and five others, removing the companies right to self-govern their property. To be clear, that bill was drafted specifically because of Disney’s opposition to the Parental Rights in Education Law. President Biden criticized this, and the latest trends in the Republican party as a whole, exclaiming, “This is not your father’s Republican party. It’s not even conservative in a traditional sense of conservatism. It’s mean, it’s ugly. Look at what’s happening in Florida: Christ, they’re going after Mickey Mouse.”

Missouri already has similar legislation in the works, two laws that specifically ban “mandatory gender or sexual diversity training or counseling,” those being Missouri House Bills 1669 and 1484. The bills also include language designed to ban “Critical Race Theory.” Having read through both, the Green and White Review has found only two substantial differences between the two: House Bill 1484 would extend the ban to “higher education,” i.e. colleges, while 1669 would establish an enforcement mechanism. First, the state board of education sends a notification to the school that violated the law. If they then fail to change their curriculum to comply with the law within thirty days the board will “withhold a maximum of ten percent of the monthly distribution of state formula funding to such entity.” Normal fund distribution would be restored once the board determines the school is in compliance.

A third Missouri bill addresses the topic of Sex Ed and unlike the other two specifically mentions sexual orientation and defines it legally. The bill, Missouri House Bill 1752, is meant to repeal the the current law about Sex Ed and replace it with updated language. That bill specifically mentions sexual orientation and gender identity, even providing legal definitions. This bill mandates that parents are told what any “curriculum, material, test, survey, questionnaire, activity, or instruction of any kind related to sexual orientation and gender identity, regardless of whether offered as part of human sexuality instruction or as part of any other class, activity, or program," contains, that parents are notified of their right to remove the student form any part of the instruction, and that all curriculum pertaining to human sexuality is available for public inspection. Incidentally, the new language introduced in Missouri House Bill 1752 mostly deals with sexual orientation and gender identity.

None of those bills have passed the Missouri State House, nor are they scheduled for a hearing as of publication. However, Missouri is not alone in drafting such bills. Texas’s legislators have gone on record expressing interest in passing their own version of those laws. Arizona’s Senate has passed a similar bill to Florida’s Parental Rights Law, which focused on giving parents more say in how their child’s health is managed and, like the Florida law, gives parents the right to sue any government entity that violates the rights enumerated in the bill.

This includes, but is not limited to, the rights to “direct the education of the minor child,” “access and review all records relating to the minor child,” “direct the moral or religious training of the minor child, “make ALL health care decisions for the minor child… unless otherwise prohibited by law,” the right to consent in writing before any biometrics or DNA records are made for the child, “the right to obtain information about a child safety service investigation involving the parent,” and “the right to access all written and electronic records of a school district or school district employee concerning the parent's child.” As of publication, the bill awaits the Arizona governor’s signature.

Naturally, the Green and White Review was curious as to where the opinions of our student body fell. These bills could affect the atmosphere at our school, as well as our neighboring schools. Some of us are LGBT+, or know someone who is, not to mention these laws specifically deal with education. Let’s take a look at the data.

To start, we got 35 responses back, with one “joke” response thrown out. That is 8% of the student body responding, given that we have 438 students enrolled. For the purpose of statistics, we only care about the responses to one question, the first one.

Well, three of the thirteen explicitly expressed that they believe that being gay is morally wrong. That’s 23% of the yes’s. Six, however, cited protecting the children or concerns over the kid’s maturity, or 46%. One also raised another point, saying “This is a place of learning, not a place where we talk about outside things that don't matter in school.”

However, there are other valid points raised by students who said no. For example, "What good does it do to stop the education of something very common in the world? By banning things to do with LGBTQ it makes young adults insecure or scared to discover themselves and be themselves." Another said, "[N]o adult in an education position is going to give their students and age inappropriate, unwarranted lecture about LGBT couples. Still another said "Gay children are going to be gay regardless of a bill[…] Queer kids need support, not to be fearful of being who they are in a classroom setting."

Some students believe that the discussion of sexual orientation or gender identity doesn't belong in classrooms in any way shape or form, others believe that at the very least the topic shouldn't be banned from conversation. Clearly the issue is still up for debate among our student body, regardless of the truth of the matter. No matter what consensus or student body comes to, these bills exist, and will affect LGBT+ teachers, parents, and students alike. Whether you believe that's a good or bad thing is up to you.

If you have questions or concerns about anything written in this article or any other please contact the staff at newspaper@mtvernon.k12.mo.us