Victims of the Flint Water Crisis Are Still Waiting to Get Paid

This post was originally published on Word In Black By:  Willy Blackmore In 2021, when a settlement between the state of Michigan and residents of Flint was approved, there was a sense that those who were affected by the water crisis were close to reaching some kind of closure. “Flint families are finally going to get some justice,” lawyer Corey Stern, who represented 4,000 children from the majority Black city, said at the time. But today, as we approach the 10-year anniversary of the April day when the administration of then-Governor Rick Snyder switched the city’s water source from the City of Detroit to the corrosive Flint River, residents still haven’t seen a dime. The only people who have been paid out of the $626 million fund that the settlement established have been lawyers who worked on the many, many cases that were rolled up into one mega lawsuit. “No single person who has actually been affected by the water crisis here will see a million dollars, 16-year-old environmental activist Mari Copeney, known as Little Miss Flint, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “And y’all wonder why I continue to say Flint is still in crisis.” This is partly...