Like hundreds of families across Lowndes County, Alabama, the McPhersons do not have access to proper sanitation – just a pipe carrying raw sewage a short distance from their home. For a country that is one of the richest in the world, it is a public health scandal.
“There’s a chance if you don’t watch yourself, everything will shoot down with force and get all over you,” says Christopher McPherson.
Nina Lakhani, a senior reporter for Guardian US, explains to Nosheen Iqbal that Lowndes County is one of the poorest districts in the country and has a history of brutal cotton plantation enslavement and also the civil rights and Black power movements.
They discuss the way the soil has affected access to sanitation in the county, the significant health and psychological problems that have followed, and the long struggle for justice in which a landmark civil rights ruling under the Biden administration has been overturned by the actions of Donald Trump.
Support the Guardian today: theguardian.com/todayinfocuspod
Photograph: Andi Rice/For The Guardian