Warren County, 1982: The protest that lost, and gave America the words "environmental racism"

The spirit and experience of resistance through the Civil Rights Movement was widespread in the southern United States and in many northern urban areas. The movement was strongly church-based; many of its leaders, like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, were ministers. When the Environmental Justice Movement began building momentum in the early 1980s, it was church-based civil rights leaders, seasoned in the Civil Rights Movement, who were at its fore. The 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina, against a PCB dump were led by local church officials and by the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, a longtime civil rights activist and at that time the head of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice.
Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster, From the Ground Up, 126

My reflection In the summer of 1978, a truck drove the back roads of North Carolina with a valve open. The men driving it were getting rid of oil from a Raleigh company called Ward Transformer. The oil was laced with PCBs, industrial chemicals once used to insulate electrical equipment and later banned because they don't break down and build up in living things. By the time anyone noticed, a stain ran along the shoulders of more than two hundred miles of road in fourteen counties (United States v. Ward, 4th Cir. 1982; Warren County v. North Carolina, 1981).

The state decided to scrape up the contaminated dirt and bury it. It chose a farm near the small town of Afton, in Warren County. The county was about 64 percent Black, and the township around the site was between two-thirds and three-quarters Black, depending on the count. The county was also one of the poorest in the state (Labalme).
People in Warren County did everything a citizen is supposed to do. They came to the hearings. They formed a residents' group. They hired lawyers and sued. They lost. A federal judge ruled for the state in 1981, and a second suit, a civil rights claim brought by the NAACP, was turned down in August 1982 (Warren County v. North Carolina; Fair Housing Project of North Carolina).

On September 15, 1982, the first trucks came. Marchers set out from Coley Springs Baptist Church. Fifty-five people lay down in the road in front of the state's yellow dump trucks and were arrested (Labalme). One of them was Dollie Burwell, a local church organizer. Her young daughter, Kimberly, marched too. Burwell later said her strongest memory of 1982 was the day Kimberly, then ten, was arrested (UCC, 2022).
The protests lasted six weeks. By one careful count there were 523 arrests (Labalme). Among those taken to jail were Walter Fauntroy, Washington, D.C.'s delegate to Congress, and Benjamin Chavis, a minister with the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice. The state patrol, Chavis later said, charged him with driving too slowly on the road to the protest (Chavis, 2022).

And the trucks kept coming. By late October, more than 7,000 loads of soil had gone into the ground (Labalme).

By the usual measure, Warren County lost. The landfill was built. But something else happened in that jail. Chavis has said that one night there he found a name for what he was seeing: environmental racism (Inside Climate News, 2025). Fauntroy went back to Washington and asked Congress's auditors to look at where hazardous-waste landfills were being put. In 1983 they reported that three of the four big landfills in the Southeast sat in majority-Black communities (U.S. GAO, RCED-83-168). In 1987 Chavis's commission published a national study finding that race was the strongest predictor of where commercial hazardous-waste facilities were located (UCC, Toxic Wastes and Race, 1987). A movement now had evidence and a name: environmental justice.

It's tempting to tell this as a clean story: the church, the march, the awakening. The truth is messier and more useful. The legal scholars Luke Cole and Sheila Foster write that church-based civil rights leaders were "at its fore," and at Warren County they were (Cole & Foster, From the Ground Up, 2001). But the fight began four years earlier with local residents, Black and white, many of them organized by a white couple, Ken and Deborah Ferruccio (McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism, 2007). The man quoted at the top of this issue, Henry Rooker, was white. Cole and Foster themselves describe the movement as a river with many tributaries, not a single spring.

There is a harder question underneath: was Warren County chosen because it was Black? No document says so. The state said the land was suitable. Critics answered that the groundwater sat only a few feet below the pit, and that the Environmental Protection Agency waived some of its own safeguards to approve it (Labalme). Scholars spent years arguing over the national pattern. Some early studies found no clear racial gap, and others asked whether poor families moved near dumps after they were built because land was cheap (Been, 1994; Anderton et al., 1994). The most careful long-term study, by Paul Mohai and Robin Saha, followed three decades of facility siting and found that facilities tended to arrive where people of color were already concentrated, not the other way around (Mohai & Saha, 2015). The best reading of Warren County is not a secret plot. It's something more ordinary: poison goes where resistance is expected to be weakest.

That is the lesson I keep returning to. Every step in Warren County was legal. There was a hearing, a permit, a court ruling. The process was followed, and it still delivered the poison to the people with the least power to refuse it. What the residents won was not the landfill fight. They won the ability to name the pattern, and a name is something the next town can use.

Twenty years later, the state dug the landfill back up and treated the soil, at a cost of more than $17 million (NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources; TDX Associates project profile). A state highway marker now stands near the site. It reads, in part: "Protests sparked environmental justice movement in U.S." (NC DNCR).