08/23/2026
In Lowndes County, where most of the population is Black, hundreds of residents either have no septic tanks or failing systems across Alabama’s Black Belt, named for its ink-colored soil, once tilled by enslaved people and their descendants.
The sanitation crisis has long been on the government’s radar, with representatives from the EPA, Congress and the United Nations having visited the area to examine the issue.
Congress promised to help fix these problems — and hundreds of similar ones across the country — when lawmakers four years ago dedicated unprecedented funding to help cash-strapped regions plagued by environmental issues.
But at the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the EPA gutted the $2.8 billion grant program created to provide residents relief. The cuts came after Trump issued an executive order to rid the federal government of DEI initiatives and left communities, like Lowndes, struggling to find new funding as environmental crises have been left to fester.
Read more: nbcnews.to/3RYdf8D
