American Oil Companies Exported Jim Crow to the World—This is How
The fossil fuel industry didn't just extract oil. It extracted power itself, building a global empire on the bones of racial hierarchy.
The fossil fuel empire we know today was forged in the Jim Crow South, exported globally through corporate colonialism, and continues to operate on the same fundamental principle: some lives matter more than others.
That same logic fuels today’s fight against climate liability, where the industry’s political allies are scrambling to block Polluters Pay laws — not just to avoid costs, but to preserve a system built on sacrifice zones and impunity.
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Building the Jim Crow Oil Empire
When crude oil bubbled up from the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania just before the Civil War, white Americans saw it as divine intervention: "a mystical fount that might ease America out of bloodshed and into a new age of peace and prosperity," as historian Darren Dochuk puts it. Oil was supposed to be "a healing balm for the body politic."
But this healing was for whites only.
As the industry moved south to Texas and Oklahoma at the turn of the 20th century, it collided with the emergence of the "Lost Cause" mythology, the poisonous lie that slavery was benevolent and the Civil War was about "states' rights." White oilmen saw crude oil as a tool to rebuild the South's economy while reinstalling a racial hierarchy that kept Black people structurally at the bottom.
They codified segregation directly into the oil fields. By 1901, white oilmen had firmly established a pattern: the most lucrative roles went to white workers, while Black and Mexican American laborers got the most dangerous jobs, including drilling pipe and laying 600-pound pipelines through mosquito-infested swamps for a fraction of white workers' pay.
The segregation was clear. Black workers lived in tents while whites got sturdy lodging. Black workers hunted for their own food while white workers ate on the company dime. And when tensions flared, oil towns became scenes of brutal racial violence. The 1921 Tulsa massacre, where white rioters killed 36 Black people and obliterated "Black Wall Street," happened in a city nicknamed the "Oil Capital of the World." That wasn't a coincidence.
As late as 1940, Black workers made up less than 0.05 percent of all employees in oil production, despite representing significant portions of the population in oil-producing regions.
Exporting American Apartheid
American oil companies didn't leave their racism at home when they went international. They helped entrench and export Jim Crow hierarchies as the industry went global, creating what University of Pennsylvania scholar Robert Vitalis calls "a system of privilege and inequality, which we know as Jim Crow in the United States, as Apartheid in South Africa, and as racism more generally."
In 1930s Mexico, U.S. oil firms relegated Black and Chicano workers to "the hot, dirty, and unskilled jobs: clearing land, doing laundry, cooking and washing, cleaning buildings, and carrying equipment," according to historian Jonathan Brown. White American supervisors lived in segregated compounds while Mexican and other non-white workers were housed separately in inferior conditions.
In Saudi Arabia, Standard Oil Company of California (now part of BP) created what amounted to American apartheid in the desert. The company built entirely segregated communities with separate housing, dining facilities, and recreational areas for white Americans versus Arab workers. White American families lived in air-conditioned suburban-style homes with swimming pools and country clubs, while Saudi workers lived in company barracks with basic amenities.
In Libya, Esso (another ExxonMobil predecessor) established what it called a "settler community". This community physically separated Libyans from white American, British, and Canadian employees, in what amounted to architectural apartheid. The message was clear: oil wealth belonged to white people, while local populations were expendable labor.
Even Texaco chief executive Torkild Rieber was a Nazi sympathizer, whose company fueled Hitler's regime in the 1930s. When you trace the corporate family trees of today's oil giants, you find DNA that runs straight back to the most virulent white supremacist movements of the 20th century.
The Corporate Shell Game
Here’s the twist: the companies behind these racist practices didn’t disappear. They’ve just been playing a century-long corporate shell game, rebranding and merging to obscure their toxic origins.
ExxonMobil, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, traces its lineage directly to Humble Oil and Refining Company, founded in 1911 in Humble, Texas. After being acquired by Standard Oil of New Jersey in 1919, Humble became part of the corporate empire that would eventually rebrand as Exxon in 1972, then merge with Mobil in 1999. Chevron’s corporate DNA includes Texaco, and BP stems from the Standard Oil Company of California. Shell, Total, and other European giants followed similar patterns, adopting American-style racial hierarchies in their international operations.
These are the same corporate entities that today spend millions lobbying against climate action, fighting environmental justice lawsuits, and seeking legal immunity from accountability. They’ve simply shed their old names like snake skins, but the underlying faults remains unchanged.
Environmental Racism Today
This history is the foundation of everything happening today. Drive through Louisiana's "Cancer Alley"—the 85-mile stretch between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where over 200 petrochemical plants pump toxins into predominantly Black communities—and you're seeing the Jim Crow oil field in modern form. A recent Tulane University study found that in Louisiana, people of color are underrepresented in both high-paying and low-paying petrochemical jobs while bearing the brunt of toxic pollution. They get all the poison, and none of the prosperity.
Nationally, more than 1 million African Americans live within half a mile of oil and gas facilities. In some states, one in five Black residents lives in the shadow of these toxic installations. Black children suffer 138,000 asthma attacks annually from oil and gas emissions, a rate nearly double that of white children.
The same companies that built segregated oil camps in Saudi Arabia now site refineries in Black neighborhoods in Houston. The same corporate logic that paid Mexican workers a fraction of white wages now lobbies against climate accountability laws that would force polluters to pay for cleanup. And the same industry that exported American apartheid abroad now deploys armies of lawyers to avoid paying reparations to frontline communities.
Breaking the Cycle
The climate crisis and the crisis of racial injustice are the same problem with different symptoms. Both stem from a system that treats some people as disposable in service of concentrated wealth and power.
Understanding this history shows us that another future is possible. The same communities that oil companies have exploited and poisoned for over a century are leading the fight for clean energy and climate justice today. From Cancer Alley to Standing Rock, frontline communities are demanding not just cleaner air and water, but a fundamental restructuring of who holds power.
That's what the "Make Polluters Pay" movement is about. Across the country, states and communities are using two main tools to force accountability: climate superfund laws and climate liability lawsuits. Superfund laws require fossil fuel companies to pay into state-managed funds for climate disaster response. Liability lawsuits seek direct compensation for climate damages already suffered. Both target the same fundamental injustice: companies that knowingly caused harm while communities bear the consequences.
In that context, making polluters pay is both a fiscal tool and a racial justice mechanism. It asks a foundational question the industry has long evaded: who gets paid back, and who gets left behind? If Black communities were systematically redlined into flood zones and refinery corridors, and fossil fuel companies knowingly profited from that arrangement, then repairing that harm must go beyond infrastructure. It must be reparative.
This is why the Trump administration's new executive order to shield oil companies from climate lawsuits feels so familiar. It's the same playbook: use state power to protect corporate profits while communities suffer the consequences. When states like New York and Vermont try to make polluters pay for climate damage through climate superfund laws, they're essentially trying to do what Reconstruction attempted after the Civil War: force those who profited from an unjust system to help repair the damage. And just like after Reconstruction, we're seeing a coordinated backlash designed to maintain the status quo.
The fossil fuel industry's desperate fight for legal immunity reveals their greatest fear: being held accountable not just for climate damage, but for more than a century of extracting wealth and power from communities of color while leaving them with the toxic aftermath.
To make polluters pay is to name what’s been true all along: that the climate crisis didn’t just emerge from carbon, but from the conquest of land, of labor, and of Black and Indigenous life. And justice demands more than transition. It demands restitution.
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References
1. Brown, Jonathan C. Oil and Revolution in Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
2. Clean Air Task Force and NAACP. "Fumes Across the Fence-Line: The Health Impacts of Air Pollution from Oil and Gas Facilities on African American Communities." November 2017.
3. Dochuk, Darren. Anointed with Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America. New York: Basic Books, 2019.
4. Pierre-Louis, Kendra. "Understanding the Fossil Fuel Industry's Legacy of White Supremacy." DeSmog, March 29, 2021.
5. Supran, Geoffrey, and Naomi Oreskes. "Assessing ExxonMobil's Global Warming Projections." Science 379, no. 6628 (January 2023): 1-4.
6. Terrell, Kimberly, et al. "Petrochemical Industry Employment and Environmental Justice in Louisiana." Ecological Economics 215 (2025): 1-12.
7. Vitalis, Robert. America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.
 | A guest post by
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A lot of heart and a lot of work went into this writing. Thank you.
I worked (research assistant, photo procurement, preliminary editing) on a book about the Greenwood Race Massacre, “The Victory of Greenwood” by Carlos Moreno. I was born 100 mi. from Tulsa and never heard a word about it until I was grown!!! Thank you for continuing to shine a light on this insidious chapter of American history and its continuing influence. Also, check out the new mayor of Tulsa’s work toward righting these historic wrongs.
Even to the point of responses to environmental disasters, be they human errors (like oil spills) or natural (like hurricane Katrina) there’s latent(and blatant) racism and class bias. That’s without us getting into the land/oil theft from indigenous peoples.