CHICAGO—Samuel Corona’s environmental organizing career started over coffee. He was only supposed to talk with Peggy Salazar, then executive director of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, for half an hour. Their conversation lasted three hours instead.

Corona sought out Salazar over a decade ago because he wanted to learn more about how local industry in his Chicago neighborhood was affecting his children’s health.

“I never had asthma. Their mom never had asthma. But because of our environment and our air, in the summertime the air got so thick that my kid had to take an inhaler,” Corona said.

That pollution, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development found in 2022, is part of a discriminatory pattern in which the city kept polluting industries out of predominantly whi

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