What Steel Mills Teach Us About Data Centers and Environmental Justice

"It is a blue-collar city. Factories created a lot of the employment opportunities here, especially during the Great Migration. African Americans migrated here from South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, to come to Baltimore to work in factories. Bethlehem Steel, at one period of time, was the largest employer in Baltimore City."— Imam Earl El-Amin, Baltimore Legacy Project Interview

Imam Earl El-Amin's recollection captures more than an economic history. It recalls an era when Baltimore's identity was forged in steel, shipbuilding, and industrial labor; when the city's skyline rose alongside the fortunes of thousands of working families whose lives revolved around the whistle at Sparrows Point.

For more than eight decades, Bethlehem Steel dominated Baltimore's industrial landscape. By the 1950s, the company employed more than 33,000 workers, making it the city's largest employer and one of the largest steel producers in the nation. At its peak, Sparrows Point was the largest steel mill in the world. Steel produced there became the skeleton of the Empire State Building, stretched across the Golden Gate Bridge and the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and filled the hulls of countless ships. During the Second World War, the mill produced nearly one-fifth of the steel used by the United States Navy.

For Black families arriving from the rural South, the mill represented something far greater than industrial production. Many migrants came from communities where opportunities had been confined to sharecropping, domestic labor, or seasonal agricultural work. Formal education was often limited. A steady job could mean a mortgage instead of rent, savings instead of debt, and a measure of dignity long denied elsewhere.

Yet the promise of industrial prosperity rested upon unequal foundations.

Labor Beneath the Furnace

The same jobs that elevated many Black families economically demanded extraordinary sacrifice. Black workers routinely endured racial hostility from supervisors and white coworkers while performing the most physically punishing and dangerous assignments in the mill. They worked the coke ovens, blast furnaces, and other "hot jobs," where temperatures reached unbearable levels and exposure to toxic dust became a daily reality.

The dangers were not accidental. Research has shown that longstanding racist assumptions shaped workplace practices. An enduring myth that Black workers were somehow biologically better suited to withstand extreme heat echoed arguments once used to justify the exploitation of enslaved Africans. As Dr. Alan Derickson has documented, in the American Public Health Association journal. Industrial employers recycled these beliefs to rationalize assigning Black workers to the most hazardous environments.

The consequences accumulated over decades. Explosions claimed lives without warning. Silica dust slowly destroyed lungs. Occupational illnesses emerged years after retirement, leaving many former steelworkers to spend the final chapters of their lives battling chronic respiratory disease.

Resistance Inside the Mill

In 1959, more than half a million steelworkers across the country launched what became the largest work stoppage in American history. The strike lasted 116 days before President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the Taft-Hartley Act, compelling employees to return to work while negotiations continued.

For the workers at Sparrow’s Point the strike carried severe hardship. Maryland law prevented striking workers from receiving unemployment insurance or public assistance, forcing many families into financial crisis.

For Black workers, collective resistance was often constrained by structural exclusion. Concentrated in the lowest-paying departments and underrepresented within union leadership. 

The inequalities of Sparrows Point extended beyond the factory gates.

White employees often lived in company-supported housing surrounding the mill, while Black workers were steered toward segregated communities such as Turner Station. These neighborhoods supplied the labor that fueled Baltimore's industrial economy while receiving comparatively little of its investment.

Environmental burdens followed racial boundaries. For decades, Bethlehem Steel accumulated violations involving air pollution, contaminated waterways, and hazardous waste that affected Bear Creek, the Patapsco River, and Old Road Bay. The consequences linger long after the furnaces cooled, leaving nearby communities to contend with environmental damage that outlasted industrial prosperity.  Among Turner Station's most notable residents was Henrietta Lacks, who moved there in 1941 after her husband, David "Day" Lacks, found employment at Sparrows Point. 

The jobs that offered many Black families a pathway into the middle class also demanded extraordinary sacrifice. At Sparrows Point, Black workers routinely faced racial hostility while being concentrated in the mill's most dangerous assignments. The coke ovens, blast furnaces, and other "hot jobs," where extreme temperatures, toxic dust, and constant physical risk were treated as ordinary conditions of employment. These patterns were not incidental. As historian Dr. Alan Derickson has documented, industrial employers drew upon racist myths that Black workers were somehow better suited to withstand extreme heat, repurposing ideas rooted in slavery to justify exposing them to the most hazardous work. The costs accumulated over a lifetime. Explosions claimed lives without warning, silica dust scarred lungs, and chronic respiratory disease often surfaced years after retirement.

Although the furnaces have long gone cold, the geography of environmental inequality remains strikingly familiar. Today's economy is increasingly organized around data centers rather than steel mills, yet many of these facilities are being concentrated in communities with limited political power, where concerns about intensive energy consumption, water use, diesel backup generators, air pollution, and strain on local infrastructure are frequently overshadowed by promises of economic growth. The technologies have changed, but the underlying question persists: who benefits from industrial progress, and who is asked to bear its environmental costs? The history of Sparrows Point reminds us that the burdens of innovation have rarely been distributed equally, making the preservation of these stories not only an act of remembrance, but also a lens through which to recognize recurring patterns in the landscapes we continue to build.