2021
March
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Monitor Daily Podcast

March 01, 2021
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Amelia Newcomb
Senior editor

Last Friday, several members of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra pulled their mobile concert truck into the Joppa neighborhood of south Dallas. And soon, a tiny outdoor concert was underway: a tribute to the tenacity of residents in an underserved neighborhood who had raised their voices in protest and literally moved a mountain.

The idea of playing there would have been laughable not long ago. Nearby was a 100,000-ton, 60-foot-high pile of roofing waste, part of an illegal dumping and recycling operation that spewed industrial noise and toxic dust into the largely Black and Latino neighborhood. Complaints of residents like Marsha Jackson initially went unheard, reinforcing a long history of neglect of the area.

But Shingle Mountain is now gone, the result of sustained pressure on the city to act. And Quincy Roberts, a Black resident of Dallas who grew up nearby, and whose trucking firm just completed the massive cleanup, decided to reinforce a different message: that the neighborhood is valued. A trained tenor who sits on the board of the Dallas Symphony, he rallied fellow musicians. And on Friday afternoon, Ms. Jackson and friends and family settled into folding chairs to listen to piano four hands, violin duets, and tenor Lawrence Brownlee’s rendition of “All Night, All Day (Angels Watching Over Me).”

It was a caring tribute, done without public fanfare for a group who persisted in being heard. As Mr. Brownlee said of his song: “It’s to say she and so many people are important.”


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Supporters watch as former President Donald Trump speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, Feb. 28, 2021. Some 55% of attendees polled would vote for Mr. Trump in 2024.

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Upasana Makati with White Print, the lifestyle magazine in Braille that she launched in 2013, photographed at a talk she gave in Mumbai, India.

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A protest slogan is written on a street in Yangon, Myanmar (also known as Burma).

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Sahrawi women take part in a parade at the Awserd refugee camp, one of several that are home to more than 165,000 refugees in Tindouf, Algeria, on Feb. 27, 2021. A movement seeking an independent Sahrawi homeland announced the end of a three-decade ceasefire with Moroccan forces in November.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

Thanks for starting your week with us. Please join us again tomorrow for a look at what might be the next environmental justice issue: urban trees.

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