The Loss of Sanctuary; The Loss of Community: Climate Change in the Era of Black Lives Matter

Bible in the rubble of the St. John's Baptist Church in Tappahannock, VAReflections on the Tornado that Destroyed St. John’s Baptist Church on February 23, 2016by J.T. Roane | @JTRoane | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
On the evening of February 23, 2016, a violent storm struck Essex, Richmond, and Westmoreland Counties in Virginia. More than a dozen homes along the cell’s path were destroyed leaving twenty-five or more people seriously injured and many more without their homes or operable vehicles.
One of the most devastating losses was the one-hundred-and-forty-five year old St. John’s Baptist Church and the larger community surrounding it, which is predominantly but not exclusively Black.
I am particularly hurt by the loss of St. John’s Baptist Church because it was a central institution for my father’s family and for my affirmative sense of community and belonging. This building is where all of us came into the church, where we sang on the youth choirs, where we played in the bathrooms and got in trouble, where we made vows, and where we went to honor the dead before their bodies returned to earth.
This church was central to who we are.
Us Roane’s do not share a common home place—a plot where we can return regularly and remember ourselves together. I remember distinctly this recognition of placeless-ness as part of my inheritance after my great aunt Mary Lou died. She was the eldest who played some part in raising her siblings and many of my generation directly or indirectly. I had grown accustomed to us all clustering around her at her house. It hadn’t occurred to me that she had no claim to the house that I knew as a sort of home place beyond her passing.
I have not gone back inside her home since a year after her death but I still pass by there every now and again to honor and remember and reflect on what was. I have interviewed my father and come to recognize that the ghosts in the landscape are really the only sites that my constantly displaced forbearers and my own generation can call on to remember who we are. This attests to our plight as the serially displaced and also our radical capacity to hold onto the intangible in order to make meaning, to mourn, and to joy.
My father can remember, just in his lifetime, a host of Black people’s houses, juke joints, baseball diamonds, luxury socializing spots, that are gone but which his generation hasn’t forgotten. Indeed, most of the landmarks that people leave you with to direct you through the dark woods of Virginia Tidewater, are not functionally there any more. They are sources of sadness but as often happiness, pride, and affirmative identification. And so it will be with the church until the congregation erects another building.
But there is something in this displacement that I need to linger at. It seems like a cruel joke to have a stable Black institution destroyed by a turn of nature and I could read the story as a dark tale if it were a novel. As my father’s memories portray, however, displacement of black social spaces is not new in the twentieth century. But the legacy of displacement here has a much deeper history as well, back to the eighteenth century when the district emerged as part of the original plantation ecology of North America.
Black history began in this district, the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula, in the aftermath of dislocation from the various rhythms of place, belonging, and social life in various African contexts. Black communities in the district began recombining various cultural practices synthesized for survival and thriving, in hulls of ships across the ocean, up the brackish water of Chesapeake Bay, and into the fresh riverine systems of the Potomac and the Rappahannock.  
This was also an ecological disaster and Black communities faced the brunt of the consequences of clearing the forests, exploiting indigenous place making practices, and making earth into sellable land. In the process of tobacco cultivation, the land was quickly exhausted, deforestation began the process of extensive silt run off into the rivers, and over fishing on the part of colonists nearly destroyed a delicate web of life.
What most people now recognize as climate change didn’t originate in the era of smoke stacks. On the contrary, plantations and manors caused a great deal of disruption along with imported species, diseases, and mono-culture. The radical continuity in my community’s and my family’s vulnerability suggests to me that in the era of Black Lives Matter, the Flint water crisis, and the erasure of homes and St. John’s Baptist in the tornadoes of Feb. 23, it is imperative that we chart environmental issues as always having been central to Black life. We need to seriously address climate change and the ecological destruction which will be the most lasting impact of this social order and threatens our collective future.
What St. John’s teaches us as well, is that marginality and vulnerability have prompted Black ingenuity and imagination around how to build a collective and responsible social world since we were orphaned into social death. These will undoubtedly remain key resources as we plot a future free and clear of the conditions that put our communities at greatest risk for risk.
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J.T. Roane is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Columbia University. His scholarly interests center on the intersections between the history of science, medicine, public health and the broader social history of the late 20th Century United States, with specific focus on Black communities. He is currently working on a project on the politics of health and vitality in Philadelphia in the mid-twentieth century.