Dennis Chestnut remembers the day in 1968 when his mother called him on the communal pay phone of his college dormitory. Kelvin Mock, a 7-year-old boy from the largely Black neighborhood where Chestnut grew up, had died in one of the regular fires at Washington’s open-air landfill. Subscribe for unlimited access to The Post You can cancel anytime. Subscribe

“My mom was very distraught,” Chestnut says. “She said to me, ‘The reason I am calling is that could have been you.’” Memories of childhood, of days spent playing in and near the dump — despite his parents’ stern warnings — and the environmental injustice of the trash burns, which spread ash through the nearby streets, came flooding back when Chestnut saw a 1910 painting called “Blossom Time” at the Smithsonian Institution’s Nationa

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