BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Maryland’s NAACP is calling for a state and federal criminal investigation into Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for spreading sewage sludge in poor, black communities in Baltimore.

At the same time, congressional lawmakers plan hearings on possible dangers of sludge, or treated human waste spread as fertilizer.

“I think we need to bring some attention to this,” said Gerald Stansbury, head of the state NAACP chapter, which has called for state and federal investigations to determine whether Hopkins and the federal government illegally dumped sewage sludge in the communities.

Hopkins and the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a study, released in 2005, that spread Class A sewage sludge — treated to eliminate pathogens — around homes in several of Baltimore’s black communities. Researchers hoped to determine whether the sludge would reduce lead in the soil, from paint chipping off houses.

The sludge not only reduced lead, but also helped grow grass, which reduced the chance children could put dirt — and lead — into their mouths or track it into their homes, the study concluded.

But critics have claimed sludge causes illness and is unsafe to be spread on land.

“To be able to put human waste and industrial waste on people’s lawns, and then to target poor people, it just disturbed me,” Stansbury said.

He sent a letter Monday to Attorney General Douglas Gansler and U.S. Sen. Barbara Mikulski asking for an investigation into whether criminal action took place when researchers spread the sludge.

Stansbury compared the Baltimore study to the notorious 40-year Tuskegee Experiment, in which the U.S. Public Health Service studied syphilis in 399 illiterate black Alabama sharecroppers from 1932 to 1972 without telling them what their illness was.

Rufus Chaney, a USDA research agronomist from Greenbelt, helped conduct the sludge experiment and said the most significant risk to the families came from the lead, not the sludge.

“I am comfortable that the issues of soil and housing [lead] risks to the children were well-disclosed,” Chaney said. The type of sludge used is “available for sale for all home and garden uses in the region,” he said.

Baltimore City NAACP President Marvin “Doc” Cheatham also contacted Mikulski, but he didn’t stop there. At the top of his list, which included Mayor Sheila Dixon, was California Democrat U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environmental and Public Works and plans to hold the hearings.

“We’re definitely troubled because it’s in our city,” Cheatham said. “What we’re trying to do is alert everybody so we can find out what exactly happened.”

Johns Hopkins referred comment to the Kennedy Krieger Institute, which helped identify the nine homes studied and said the sludge used has been proven safe.

“This is a commercially available product that’s entirely safe, and people use it every day when planting their gardens,” said Bryan Stark, a spokesman for the institute. “The use of this has been a well-established product.”

Gansler’s office does not comment on whether it is conducting an investigation, spokeswoman Raquel Guillory said.

msilvestri@baltimoreexaminer.com