Advocacy

Memphis Community Against Pollution

Memphis Community Against Pollution grew out of the 2020 Byhalia Connection pipeline fight in Boxtown. Led by KeShaun Pearson, the group has carried the same documentary-first organizing method into the permit challenges against xAI's Colossus supercomputer in South Memphis.

Location
Memphis, TN
Founded
2020
Website
https://www.memphiscap.org/

Memphis Community Against Pollution formed in 2020 as Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, a neighborhood coalition that fought Valero and Plains All American’s proposed Byhalia Connection crude-oil pipeline through Boxtown and the surrounding South Memphis freedmen’s settlements. The pipeline would have crossed the Memphis Sand Aquifer, the city’s sole source of drinking water, along a route that the developers selected because, in the words of a Plains executive captured on a 2020 recording, it was “the path of least resistance.”

The coalition, led by KeShaun Pearson and staffed by residents of Boxtown, Westwood, and the adjacent tracts, paired door-to-door organizing with aquifer science, city council testimony, and national press. By July 2021 the developers canceled the pipeline. Protect Our Aquifer, the Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter, and the Southern Environmental Law Center carried the legal and scientific weight; MCAP built the neighborhood coalition and the public record.

After the pipeline victory the organization rebranded as Memphis Community Against Pollution and carried the playbook into the xAI Colossus fight. MCAP organized the Boxtown residents who testified at the Shelby County Health Department hearings on xAI’s gas turbines in 2024 and 2025, supported the Southern Environmental Law Center and NAACP Memphis branch in their July 2025 administrative appeal of the air permit, and published independent air-quality monitoring data when the county’s own monitors failed. KeShaun Pearson remains president and public spokesperson.

The organization’s method is the one the Cooper Square Committee and the Black Bottom Archives have used for two generations: document what is happening block by block, name the people and institutions doing it, and keep a public record that every subsequent organizer can use. MCAP’s archive of the Byhalia fight and the Colossus fight lives at memphiscap.org and in the depositions, public comments, and press records its organizers have seeded across Memphis media.

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