According to AirNow, the federal government’s website that is home to the U.S. Air Quality Index, ground-level ozone, a major component of smog, is one of five major pollutants the Environmental Protection Agency measures to establish a particular community’s air quality index. Still, the city described its limited findings as “definitive and reassuring.” We deserve better than such misleading reports sanctioned by our mayor.

This pollution isn’t impacting majority-white suburbs in East Memphis or Collierville. It’s impacting South Memphis, a historically redlined, majority-Black, working-class community long targeted for industrial zoning. Our neighborhoods have been burdened for generations by landfills, chemical plants and toxic industries. xAI’s turbines continue that legacy. Once again, our health is being threatened for someone else’s profit.

When children in our community struggle to breathe, when our elders are rushed to the ER during Code Orange air days, we’re told this is the cost of economic progress. But we refuse to allow our lives to be collateral damage for this so-called “progress.”

Now xAI is expanding. The company recently acquired 100 acres and a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in Whitehaven — another majority-Black Memphis neighborhood — to house a second data center just 8 miles from Colossus and a half-mile from John P. Freeman School, attended by students in grades K-8. Although the Memphis Chamber of Commerce claims xAI will not use turbines at the site, according to SELC, the permit application xAI affiliate CTC Property submitted on behalf of xAI to the EPA contemplates operating 40 to 90 gas turbines at the site. Independent filings and local reporting also suggest the company may partner with a new corporate entity, Stateline Power Solutions, to place these turbines in Southaven, about a mile from the Whitehaven facility.

Pollution does not stop at state lines. I recently joined Southaven faith leaders and political leaders to speak out against this expansion. We deserve clean air whether we are in Tennessee, Mississippi or Arkansas, and this project threatens it.

The truth is out. The people are watching. And we are demanding accountability. The people of South Memphis and Southaven deserve better. We deserve leaders who protect our right to clean air — not ones who excuse corporate pollution. We deserve a permitting process that upholds the law — not one that allows flagrant violations to go unchallenged.

To the Shelby County Health Department and elected officials: Deny the permit. Do not reward what we believe to be illegal activity. Do not validate secrecy. Do not let our communities pay the price for a billionaire’s ambition.

Deny the permit, protect the people and deliver justice. Our people-powered movement is not going anywhere. We will stand as Davids against Goliath and win.