This article provides an overview of the petrochemical industry's transformation of Louisiana's Lower Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans from the early 1900s to the present. First there is a broad discussion of why the industry choose this location for development. The focus is then on a historical understanding of how the conditions for the environmental justice movement came to exist. These include: patterns of early land ownership with both race and class implications; early, systematic denial of employment to African Americans, willful lack of industry oversight on the part of regulators; and tax and development schemes that depleted local community coffers and services.