To this day, Jerry Kennedy only does laundry when it rains. For the first 54 years of his life, he lived without running water, and rainstorms were the only way he could collect enough water to wash his clothes. But Kennedy isn’t from some far-off rural outpost. He was born and raised in the Coal Run neighborhood of Zanesville, Ohio — a former coal-mining center of 25,000 in the eastern part of the state — just a few hundred feet from a municipal water line. Kennedy, now 58, is black. His neighbors, who did not have running water for more than 50 years, are also black. On July 10, the U.S. District Court of Ohio awarded them almost $10.9 million, ruling that they had been denied access to public water because of their race.
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Last Thursday’s verdict represents a sweeping acknowledgment of the Coal Run community’s suffering. “This case is a throwback to the type of discrimination everyone thinks is long gone,” says John P. Relman, a Washington civil rights attorney who represented the Coal Run residents. Relman calls the case a “landmark” because of the number of individual plaintiffs found to have suffered discrimination at the hands of their own government. “You lift up some rocks and find a couple of pretty ugly things,” he says. Kennedy, Hairston and the other plaintiffs will receive between $15,000 and $300,000 each in damages, depending on how long they had lived in the neighborhood. “This has been a long saga for lots of these people,” says G. Michael Payton, the OCRC’s executive director. “The humiliation, the feeling of being treated like second-class citizens — that shouldn’t happen today. We’re supposed to be past that.”
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