Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place thatâs been called âBloody Lowndesâ because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights
struggle, today itâs Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowersâs lifeâs work. Itâs a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many
people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth.
Flowers calls this Americaâs dirty secret. In this powerful book she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions, not just in Alabama, but across
Americaâin Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West.
Flowersâs book is the inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevensonâs Equal Justice
Initiative. It shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards, and not only those of poor minorities.