Robert Doyle Bullard was born on December 21, 1946. He is an American professor who previously served as the Dean of the Barbara Jordan – Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs from October 2011 to August 2016. He is now a Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. Before this, he was the Ware Professor of Sociology and Director of the Environmental Justice Resource Center at Clark Atlanta University. Bullard is known as the "father of environmental justice." He has worked to address environmental racism and is the leading expert on this issue. He also studies the Environmental Justice Movement, which began in the United States in the 1980s.

Early life and education

Bullard was born in Elba, Alabama, to Nehemiah and Myrtle Brundidge Bullard. He had four siblings and was the fourth child in his family. He graduated from Mulberry Heights High School in Elba as the second-highest-ranking student in his class in 1964.

After high school, Bullard earned a bachelor's degree in government from Alabama A&M University in Huntsville in 1968. After college, he served two years in the United States Marine Corps at an air control station in North Carolina.

Bullard later received a master's degree in sociology from Clark Atlanta University in 1972. He completed his Ph.D. in sociology at Iowa State University in 1976, with guidance from urban sociologist Robert ("Bob") O. Richards.

Environmental justice work

In 1979, Bullard’s wife, attorney Linda McKeever Bullard, helped Margaret Bean and other Houston residents fight a plan to build a city landfill near their homes. The lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was the first in the United States to charge environmental discrimination in waste facility placement under civil rights laws. Houston’s middle-class suburban Northwood Manor neighborhood was an unlikely place for a garbage dump, except that it was over 82% Black. Bullard, who had recently earned his doctoral degree, became an expert witness in the case. In this role, he conducted a study that showed where city waste disposal facilities were located in Houston. The study, titled Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community, was the first detailed report on ecoracism in the United States. Bullard and his researchers found that African American neighborhoods in Houston were often chosen for toxic waste sites. All five city-owned garbage dumps, six of the eight city-owned garbage incinerators, and three of the four privately owned landfills were located in Black neighborhoods, even though Black people made up only 25% of the city’s population. This discovery led Bullard to begin a long effort to fight environmental racism. Bullard once said, “Without a doubt, it was a form of apartheid where white people made decisions, and Black people, brown people, and other people of color, including Native Americans, had no voice in the process.”

During the 1980s, Bullard expanded his study of environmental racism to the entire American South, focusing on communities in Houston, Dallas, Texas; Alsen, Louisiana; Institute, West Virginia; and Emelle, Alabama. He found that Black areas had more environmental hazards than white areas, leading to higher health risks for Black residents. In 1990, Bullard published his first book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality. In the book, he wrote that the Environmental Justice Movement, a grassroots effort by people of color across America to protest environmental racism, marked a new connection between the civil rights movement and the environmental movement of the 1960s.

In 1990, Bullard (then at the University of California-Riverside) became a leader of a group of academics, later called the Michigan Group, which included Bunyan Bryant of the University of Michigan and Charles Lee of the United Church of Christ. The group wrote letters to Louis Sullivan, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and to William Reilly, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asking for meetings to discuss government policies on environmental discrimination. Sullivan did not respond, but Reilly met with the group several times, leading to the creation of the EPA’s Work Group on Environmental Equity. This group later became the Office of Environmental Equity and then the Office of Environmental Justice under EPA Administrator Carol Browner in 1993.

Bullard also helped organize the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991. Starting with a list of 30 groups working on environmental issues, Bullard expanded the list to over 300 by contacting leaders he knew and gathering information about other groups. These groups attended the Leadership Summit in October 1991, where they adopted a list of 17 “Principles of Environmental Justice.” Bullard’s list eventually included groups from outside the United States, such as Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico. The list was later published as the “People of Color Environmental Group Directory” by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Environmental Justice Executive Order 12898 after advice and research by the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), which included Professor Bullard, who chaired the Health and Research Subcommittee.

Bullard continued to support African American communities across the United States. His expert testimony helped win the case Citizens Against Nuclear Trash (CANT) v. Louisiana Energy Services (LES) for an environmental justice group. This led the federal government to deny the company’s permit for a uranium enrichment plant in Forest Grove and Center Springs, Louisiana. In 2006, when asked what kept him motivated in his work for environmental justice, Bullard said, “People who fight… People who do not let the garbage trucks and landfills and petrochemical plants roll over them. That has kept me in this movement for the last 25 years. And in the last 10 years, we’ve been winning: lawsuits are being won, reparations are being paid, apologies are being made. These companies have been put on notice that they can’t do this anymore, anywhere.”

Academic career

• Assistant or Associate Professor, Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, 1976–1988
• Associate Professor, University of Tennessee, 1987–1988
• Associate Professor or Visiting Scholar, University of California, Berkeley, 1988–1989
• Professor or Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of California-Riverside, 1989–1994
• Ware Distinguished Professor of Sociology; Director, Environmental Justice Resource Center, Clark-Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia, 1994–2011
• Dean, Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs, Texas Southern University, 2011–present

Awards and recognition

• Award for Conservation Work, National Wildlife Federation, 1990
• Recognized as One of Thirteen "Environmental Leaders of the 20th Century," Newsweek, 2008
• Award for Creating Economic Alternatives, Co-op America, 2008
• John Muir Award, Sierra Club, 2013
• Award for Excellence in Environmental, Energy, and Resource Management, American Bar Association, 2015
• Award for Outstanding Alumni Contribution, Iowa State University Alumni Association, 2015
• Award for Excellent Climate Science Communication, Stephen Schneider Award, 2019
• 2020 Lifetime Achievement Award (Champions of the Earth)
• Member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, 2021
• Environmental Leadership Award, University of California Berkeley Ecology Law Quarterly, 2022
• Lifetime Achievement Award, The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, 2022
• Honorary Doctorate, University of Johannesburg, 2022
• Honorary Doctorate, Georgetown University, 2022
• Membership in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2022
• Elected Member of the National Academy of Medicine, 2024

Selected publications

• Bullard, RD (1983). Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community. Sociological Inquiry 53, pages 273–288.
• Bullard, RD, editor (1983). Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots. Boston: South End Press.
• Bullard, RD (1987). Invisible Houston: The Black Experience in Boom and Bust. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.
• Bullard, RD (1989). In Search of the New South: The Black Urban Experience in the 1970s and 1980s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
• Bullard, RD, editor (2000a). [1990]. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality, 3rd edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0813367927
• Bullard, RD, editor (1994). Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
• Bullard, RD, Grigsby, JE, III, & Lee, C (1994). "Residential Apartheid: The American Legacy." Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies.
• Bullard, RD, & Johnson, GS, editors (1997). Just Transportation: Dismantling Race and Class Barriers to Mobility. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.
• Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Wright, BH (1997). Confronting Environmental Injustice: It's the Right Thing to Do. Environmentalism and Race, Gender, Class Issues. Race, Gender, and Class 5 (1), pages 63–79.
• Bullard, RD, & Johnson, GS (1998). Environmental and Economic Justice: Implications for Public Policy. Journal of Public Management and Social Policy 4 (4), pages 137–148.
• Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Torres, AO (1999, Fall). Atlanta: Megasprawl. Forum: For Applied Research and Public Policy 14 (3), pages 17–23.
• Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Torres, AO, editors (2000). Sprawl City: Race, Politics, and Planning in Atlanta. Washington, DC: Island Press.
• Bullard, RD, Johnson, GS, & Torres, AO (2000, February/March). Dismantling Transportation Apartheid Through Environmental Justice. Progress: Surface Transportation Policy Project 10 (1), pages 4–5.
• Bullard, RD (2000b). "People of Color Environmental Groups Directory." Flint, MI: Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
• Bullard, RD, editor (2003). Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bullard, RD (2004). Highway Robbery: Transportation Racism and New Routes to Equity. Boston: South End Press.
• Bullard, RD (2005). The Quest for Environmental Justice: Human Rights and the Politics of Pollution. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
• Bullard, RD (2007). Growing Smarter: Achieving Livable Communities, Environmental Justice, and Regional Equity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Bullard, RD (2007). The Black Metropolis in the Twenty-First Century: Race and the Politics of Place. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.
• Bullard, RD (2009). Race, Place, and Environmental Justice After Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild, and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.