Title: Flint is family in three acts
Photographer(s): LaToya Ruby Frazier
Writer(s): Michal Raz-Russo, Leigh Raiford
Designer(s): Duncan Whyte
Publisher(s): Steidl, Göttingen, Germany
Year: 2022
Print run:
Language(s): English
Pages: 324
Size: 27,5 x 32,5 cm
Binding: Hardcover
Edition:
Print: Steidl, Göttingen, Germany
Nation(s) and year(s) of Protest: U.S.A., 2016-2021
ISBN: 9783958297531
In 2014, as a cost-cutting measure, the Flint City Council switched the town’s water supply from a Detroit treatment facility to the industrial waste–filled Flint River. Forced to consume and bathe in water contaminated with lead at twenty-seven times the government’s maximum threshold, Flint’s citizens—predominantly Black and overwhelmingly poor—fell ill almost immediately, and many battle chronic medical conditions as a result.
Divided into three acts, Flint Is Family follow Shea S.Cobb (a Flint poet, activist, and mother, who became her collaborator) as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and well-being. Act I introduce Cobb, her family, and The Sister Tour, a collective of women artists. Cobb, who lives with her mother and her daughter, Zion, works as a school bus driver and hairstylist, while launching a career as a poet, singer, and songwriter. To protect her daughter’s health, Cobb makes the critical decision to leave her mother and friends behind and make the reverse migration to Mississippi, where her father resides on family-owned land. Act II follows Cobb and Zion to Newton, Mississippi, where they move in with Cobb’s father, Mr. Douglas R. Smiley. There they learn how to take care of his horses, as well as the land and fresh water springs they will one day inherit. Because of segregation and discrimination in the Newton County school system, Cobb and Zion eventually return to Flint. Act III documents the arrival in Flint in 2019 of a 26,000-pound atmospheric water generator that Frazier, Cobb, and her best friend, Amber N. Hasan—a hip-hop artist, herbalist, and community organizer—help set up and operate in their neighborhood.
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