Episode 4: Curtis Bay

We conclude this four-part environmental justice series with Curtis Bay. This episode offers a unique story about the organizing, activism, and innovative ideas coming out of the outspoken people of Curtis Bay, and it also helps the viewer to connect all the stories and themes of this series together. Hawkins Point, Fairfield, Westport, and Curtis Bay all share a history with and the challenge of waste as a tool of racial, social, and economic suppression in Baltimore. By restating the role waste has in marginalizing, shaping, and even activating these communities, the audience can hopefully begin to realize how waste is not just a byproduct of human activity. Waste can be, and is used by governing bodies all around the world, as a tool to devalue select (often marginalized) peoples and enact quiet violence against them. This cannot be forgotten in future environmental justice organizing and planning for places like South Baltimore. If the state fails to confront the role waste plays in perpetuating inequality, it will continue to undermine community efforts to address environmental justice in South Baltimore.

Curtis Bay—tucked into South Baltimore’s industrial waterfront—is a neighborhood shaped by a long history of environmental injustice. For more than a century, the community has lived beside landfills, incinerators, chemical plants, and the CSX coal terminal, whose towering black piles and constant rail traffic dominate the landscape. Residents have experienced generations of disproportionate respiratory illness, fires, explosions, and chronic neglect from state and city institutions. Yet, Curtis Bay is also a site of extraordinary resilience and imagination.

“Curtis Bay: Transformation” follows organizers, youth leaders, and environmental justice advocates as they challenge the notion that their neighborhood must function as a “sacrifice zone.” This film shows how the community’s everyday landscape makes environmental injustice visible and undeniable, while also revealing how decades of policy choices and state-sanctioned industrial expansion created the life-threatening conditions that residents face today. At the same time, it highlights Curtis Bay as a hub of innovation—where youth-led research, community composting, land reclamation, and neighborhood organizing chart a path toward a livable future.

As this film moves through present-day organizing and the filing of a 2024 civil rights complaint by the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, it underscores that environmental justice cannot rest solely on community resilience. Achieving real change requires active participation, accountability, and investment from city and state institutions. Even so, this episode closes by returning to everyday moments of joy and possibility—reminding viewers that Curtis Bay has a future worth fighting for, and that its realization depends on collective imagination and political will. At the center of this story is a guiding question: What does justice look like for Curtis Bay, and who must deliver it?