Louisiana’s Cancer Alley: the black towns inside America’s most polluted corridor

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Black Communities Pay the Price

Between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, an 85-mile corridor of petrochemical plants has earned a grim nickname: Cancer Alley.

More than 200 facilities line the Mississippi River here, processing about 25% of all petrochemical products made in the United States.

The communities wedged between these smokestacks and tank farms are predominantly Black and low-income, many descended from the enslaved people who once worked sugar plantations on this same land…

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