'An Equal Opportunity Lie': How Housing Discrimination Led to the Flint Water Crisis

A Splinter original illustrated essay.

NOTE ON SOURCES:

Everything in attributed to a historic person comes from direct oral histories or quoted remarks in books and news articles. Images drawn from historic photos. Narration by Anna Clark. The following sources were essential: Bronze Pillars: Oral History of African-Americans in Flint by Rhonda S. Sanders; Telling Our Stories: Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement in Flint, edited by Ananthakrishnan Ayer; Demolition Means Progress: Flint, Michigan, and the Fate of the American Metropolis by Andrew R. Highsmith; and contemporaneous news accounts by The Flint Journal, The Detroit Free Press, The New York Times, and Jet Magazine.

Anna Clark is a journalist in Detroit. Her book, The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, will be published in 2018.

Josh Kramer is a freelance cartoonist and journalist in Washington, D.C. He and Anna were both 2017 Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan. For more: joshkramercomics.com