Birthing the Environmental Justice Movement

Ed Ayers:
That whole ozone hole thing? You’ll hear more about it later in the show. But before that, we wanted to descend from problems high up in the stratosphere to grassroots movement and to an issue embedded in the very ground we walk on.

Ed Ayers:
In the summer of 1978, a trucking company drove across North Carolina secretly dumping a toxic liquid along stretches of rural roads. The contaminants initially came from a transformer repair company who hired the so-called midnight dumpers to get rid of the liquid. In the end, the truck drivers illegally contaminated 240 miles across the state. They spewed 31,000 of oil filled with a cancerous chemical called polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCB.

Brian Balogh:
The culprits were eventually thrown in jail but North Carolina’s state government was left with a problem: what do you do with all that soil filled with PCBs? There wasn’t yet a way to detoxify it, so the state decided to dump the contaminated soil in a landfill. But where could they put 60,000 tons of earth? One option was a site in Alabama that had already been approved by the EPA as a landfill for hazardous waste, but the state said moving the soil would be too costly, so instead they built a landfill in their own backyard in rural Warren County. Little did they know this decision would spark an environmental movement.

William Kearney:
There was a strong outcry right off the bat, and every day people came together to protest the siting of the landfill. They felt it was injustice done by the very government that was supposed to protect us to exploit a situation.

Brian Balogh:
Reverend William [Curney 00:24:04] is an associate pastor at Holy Springs Baptist Church in Warren County.

William Kearney:
I grew up in Warren County not too far from where the landfill was sited.

Brian Balogh:
Today, Reverend Curney researches health and wellness in rural communities. He also gives tours in Warren County about its environmental activism and the protest of the PCB landfill.

William Kearney:
Most of the folks who protest, they didn’t want it to happen in anyone else’s community too, so they really wanted to send a message globally that we all have a voice when it comes to social environmental justice issues.

Brian Balogh:
So why did the state government choose Warren County?

William Kearney:
It’s believed because Warren County was considered poor. It was rural and it had a large percentage of African American population, so people felt that because it was mostly a black community considered politically impotent that we were exploited.

Brian Balogh:
As soon as the state government designated Warren County as a site for the landfill, residents and organizations like the NAACP began to sue. They said the landfill would pollute the water and hurt an already shaky local economy, but the state didn’t budge and in 1982 they got the green light from the EPA to start digging. That’s when protestors took to the streets.

Speaker 7:
The protestors were told not to block the trucks. They’re now lying in the streets blocking one truck moving into the landfill. They’re refusing the order to move and they’re being arrested one by one.

Speaker 8:
We will not allow Warren County to become a dump site.

Speaker 9:
The State Highway Patrol began moving in on the marchers as they approached the entrance to the state landfill. The signs and chants of the protestors made clear their opposition to having the toxic chemical buried in their county.

William Kearney:
In September 1982, that first truckload arrived at the landfill. During that day, there were about 400 to 500 protestors. 50 were arrested on that day. Protestors were trying to block the movement of the trucks. Some were lying in the roadway and lots of them were carrying banners and signs. Among those who were arrested were even juveniles, senior citizens, and the protests didn’t stop the siting of the landfill but at least it helped minimize the site and the size of it.

Brian Balogh:
Do you think it helped make that landfill any safer, to the extent that any landfill for PCBs can be safe?

William Kearney:
The state had said that this was a safe site. It had got waivers from EPA to plant it there even though there was concerns about the water table. It was only about 13 feet or so beneath the landfill and that was not up to EPA standards. There was always questions about the safety of the site. As a matter of fact, within a period of time afterwards it began to bubble up and accumulate water, so they had to… 13 feet of water in the site. So there was always concern about the safety of the site and believed that even though it wasn’t safe it was pushed and planted in Warren County because people thought Warren County wouldn’t really push back.

Brian Balogh:
But Warren County did push back, and it wasn’t just local residents who lined the streets, blocking the truckloads of PCB contaminated soil. They were joined by civil rights leaders from across the country hoping to attract national media attention. Part of the group’s message was to show that this landfill was an example of environmental racism. The blending of civil rights, social injustice, and environmental health, all this was new at the time and it helped birth a cause that came to be known as the environmental justice movement. That movement sought to address environmental inequities in mostly low income areas and communities of color.

William Kearney:
Warren County was unique in that we as blacks had always resisted racial injustice, but it brought racial injustice and environmental injustice in the same movement. It highlight the fact that many of our communities… black communities… were being targeted with landfills and other unhealthy businesses, and historically we as black people were so focused on our social justice we didn’t have time or energy for environmental justice. So they merged the two in Warren County and put black faces on the frontline. Everybody had a part to play.

Brian Balogh:
The protestors didn’t stop the landfill from being built in Warren County, but their actions did cement them in environmental history. Ironically, that sometimes goes unrecognized right there in Warren County.

William Kearney:
Many of the everyday people who took part in a bigger protest don’t realize the impact of what we did in Warren County. They still see ourselves as impotent and without a voice. I hope that helping highlight what happened in Warren County… how the movement has made impact around the globe and how other people celebrate the fact that Warren County birthed a movement, but we haven’t seen that yet.

Brian Balogh:
As a way to amplify Warren County’s history, Reverend Curney has been documenting the stories of folks who took part in the protests nearly 40 years ago. Here’s [Terry 00:30:05] Austin Jones telling a part of her story during an interview in 2012. She participated in the protests when she was just a teenager.

Terry Austin Jones:
I was never afraid, even when we would lie out in front of the trucks and they would just stop. We were in rows and they told us, “Don’t say anything. Don’t talk. Don’t be disobedient. Just lie there.” They would come and pick us up and carry us to a bus… I believe they had a big bus… and they took us to jail. One thing though… and I often tell my daughter… they told us that we would not have a criminal record: that we wouldn’t have anything on our background. But some years later when jobs started doing criminal background checks it came up. Vance County called me for a job and they said, “But there’s one thing showing up in your background and they don’t know what it is,” and I said, “In my background? Not me.” That’s what it was. Impeding traffic is the charge. They said, “You should see about getting that expunged.”

Speaker 11:
Expunged, right.

Terry Austin Jones:
But I said, “No, I’m going to leave it there because this was for a cause and…”

Speaker 11:
Good for you.

Terry Austin Jones:
So whenever I interview and somebody asks me what it is I have the opportunity to tell them that I was engaged in the protest for PCB. I never imagined it would be what it is today. I never imagined, ever thought about, an environmental justice movement. We were just reacting on what we thought was the right thing to do.

Brian Balogh:
The protest continued in court battles after the landfill was built. Again and again, residents continued to raise the alarm about the soil’s risk to their health. Meanwhile, the Warren County inspired activists to look at other environmental injustices. In 1987, the United Church of Christ commissioned a report called Toxic Waste and Race. In it, they validated Warren County’s claim of environmental racism and showed a strong correlation between the placement of toxic waste facilities near communities of color across the country. The North Carolina state government promised detoxification of the PCB landfill as soon as the technology became available, but that process was slow going. In the end, it took 20 years for the site to be detoxified.

William Kearney:
And in 2003 is when there was celebration on site to celebrate the detoxification of the site, so there was remediation, but there’s still concerns from our residents about what happened during the period that these toxic chemicals were dumped along the roadway, hauled into Warren County then sited in Warren County, relative to health [inaudible 00:33:19] residents and the health of the environment. There hasn’t been any real, true tracking of the health impacts, environment impacts, so I hope that going forward they’ll be opportunities that we can revisit and begin to assess the health of our community and our people during that period and even now.

Brian Balogh:
What’s the state of trust in government today?

William Kearney:
There’s been period a whole lot of distrust, but I like to say that we are the people and the government represents the people, and that’s why I think Warren County’s story is so powerful: just everyday people stood up against government and the powers that be. Even though the site was still placed in Warren County, it was reduced in size and later remediated with questions. So I say to those who see issues or see concerns, “What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?” In Warren County we see that just everyday people, if we were to have a single voice around an issue we can make a difference.

William Kearney:
From my perspective, what drives me is I’d like our community to move from this victim mindset to, “We got dumped on, but we birthed a movement. Now let’s move from victim to victor. How do we use our legacy, our history, our movement to empower ourselves? Other people have written about us, talked us. Now we, everyday people, we’ve got to tell our story and own it.”