Beverly Walker-Griffea switched on the television on one of her first days as the new president of Mott Community College in Flint, Michigan, to news reports of brown water flooding from hydrants in the city. The date was August 2014, still many months away from when Flint would make the national news for lead poisoning as a result of corrosives in the water.
Walker-Griffea had just moved from a position at Montgomery College, a Maryland community college with satellite campuses on the outskirts of the Beltway. Washington, D.C., had gone through a water crisis of its own in the early 2000s, when lead leached from aging pipes into the water supply.
She was taking on leadership of Mott Community College (MCC), a community college serving the greater Flint, Michigan, and Genesee County community, thousands of miles distant from the District and its former water problems. As Walker-Griffea watched the news, newscasters explained that the brown water was the result of flushing efforts to move stagnant water out of unused pipes. At the time, the explanation appeared to be a logical one, Walker-Griffea tells Diverse.
As MCC president, Walker-Griffea joined the board of the Greater Flint Health Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to addressing health issues in Genesee County. At one of the first meetings she participated in, the group discussed local water discoloration.
The explanation that water was laying stagnant in underpopulated parts of the city made sense, given the dramatic decline from a population of about 200,000 at its peak in the 1960s.
In 2014, Flint’s population had dropped to less than 100,000, a dramatic change from its former status as a large industrial town with tens of thousands of jobs available at corporations like General Motors. As plants closed and the jobs moved out of town, residents followed suit, along with many of the city’s young people.
Today, Flint is a majority Black city in which almost half of residents live in poverty.
