Warren County, 1982, and the Protest That Named Environmental Racism

In September 1982, dump trucks began rolling down a two-lane road toward a new landfill outside the small community of Afton, in Warren County, North Carolina. They were loaded with soil scraped from the shoulders of state highways, soil soaked with polychlorinated biphenyls, the industrial chemicals known as PCBs, which Congress had banned from most new manufacturing a few years before. Waiting by the road were people from the county, many of them Black, many of them farmers, church members and schoolchildren, along with civil rights leaders who had driven in from across the South. As the trucks approached, protesters lay down on the pavement in front of them. State troopers lifted them, one by one, and carried them to buses. Over about six weeks, more than 500 people were arrested. The landfill opened anyway. But the protest gave the country a phrase it had not used before, environmental racism, and set off a chain of studies, summits and policies that still shapes how Washington decides where pollution goes.

In short: The Warren County protests did not stop a toxic landfill, but they turned a local fight into a national question: why do so many waste sites end up in Black, Latino, Native and poor communities? The answer, pursued by researchers and organizers who were inspired by Afton, became the environmental justice movement.

How the PCBs got to the roadside

The story starts with a crime. In the summer of 1978, a trucking operation working for a Raleigh company that handled used electrical transformers drove along rural highways in North Carolina at night with a valve open, letting oil contaminated with PCBs drain onto the road shoulders. The goal was to avoid the cost of proper disposal. By the time it was discovered, PCB-laced oil had been spread along roughly 200 miles of roadside in more than a dozen counties. The people responsible were later convicted.

PCBs are a family of chemicals once used widely in transformers, capacitors and other equipment because they resist heat and do not break down easily. That stability is exactly the problem: they persist in soil and water for decades, build up in the fatty tissue of fish and animals, and have been linked to cancer and other health effects. Congress restricted their manufacture in the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976.

The state had to put the contaminated soil somewhere. It chose a site in Warren County, near Afton. State officials said the site was technically suitable. Residents and scientists who studied it disputed that, pointing out that groundwater in the area sat close to the surface and that many families drew water from wells.

Warren County was, and is, a rural county with one of the highest shares of Black residents in North Carolina, and at the time it was among the poorest counties in the state. People there did not believe that was a coincidence.

The people who refused

The fight against the landfill began years before the trucks came. Local residents formed a group and filed lawsuits. Some of the early organizers were white residents who lived near the site; the coalition included Black and white families who had different histories and the same well water. The lawsuits failed, and the state pressed ahead.

What changed in 1982 was the arrival of the civil rights movement's organizing tradition. Local leaders, including Dollie Burwell, a Warren County resident and church activist, worked with ministers and civil rights groups to turn the site into a moral stand. The Reverend Leon White of the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice, which had an office in North Carolina, helped organize. The Reverend Benjamin Chavis, who led the commission's work, came. So did Walter Fauntroy, the District of Columbia's delegate to Congress, who was among those arrested.

The tactics were the tactics of the 1960s: marches from the church to the site, prayer, people sitting and lying down in the road, children walking beside their parents. The difference was the target. This was not a lunch counter or a bus station but a landfill, and the claim was not about access to a public place but about who is forced to live next to danger.

That shift in target is the heart of why Warren County matters. Civil rights activists had long fought segregation in where people could live, work and go to school. Warren County asked the next question: if segregation shaped where Black families lived, did it also shape what got built next to them?

The word, and the evidence

Benjamin Chavis is generally credited with coining or popularising the term environmental racism, which he used to describe the targeting of communities of colour for toxic waste sites and polluting industries and their exclusion from the decisions that put them there. The phrase gave organizers a frame that connected their local fight to a national pattern.

But a phrase is not proof, and the next step came from Congress. Fauntroy, after his arrest, asked the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, now called the Government Accountability Office, to look at where hazardous waste landfills were located in the Southeast. Its 1983 report examined the four large commercial hazardous waste landfills in the eight states of the EPA's southeastern region. It found that three of the four were in communities where most residents were Black, even though Black residents were a minority of the region's population.

Four landfills is a small sample, and the report was careful in its conclusions. But it was the first federal document to put the pattern in writing. It also pushed the United Church of Christ's commission to undertake a far larger study, published in 1987, that would take the question national.

What the landfill did and what came after

The Afton landfill took the contaminated soil and was then closed. For years, residents worried about leaks. Under pressure from local activists who never stopped pushing, and after the state agreed that the site should be cleaned up, North Carolina eventually treated the soil on site to break down the PCBs, in work completed in the early 2000s. Officials described it as detoxifying the landfill. It took more than two decades and millions of dollars, and it happened because a community refused to let the issue drop.

The broader legacy runs through the following years:

• The 1987 Toxic Wastes and Race report from the United Church of Christ, which found that race was strongly associated with where commercial hazardous waste facilities were located across the country.
• The work of sociologists like Robert Bullard, whose 1990 book on pollution in the South set its case studies against the backdrop of Warren County.
• The First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in Washington in 1991.
• The creation of an environmental equity office at the EPA in 1992 and President Clinton's executive order on environmental justice in 1994.

Each of those is its own story. All of them trace part of their lineage to a two-lane road in North Carolina.

The path of least resistance, in writing

If the Warren County organizers needed proof that siting decisions followed power, a consultant handed it to them two years later.

In 1984, a Los Angeles firm called Cerrell Associates prepared a report for the California Waste Management Board on the political difficulties of siting waste-to-energy incinerators. Its advice was candid. It described which kinds of communities were most likely to organize against a facility and which were least likely to resist, and it suggested that communities with lower incomes, less formal education and older or more rural populations, the kinds of places where residents were less likely to have the time, money and connections to fight, offered the path of least resistance. It also advised companies and officials to avoid middle- and upper-income neighbourhoods.

The report did not use the word race as its main criterion. It did not have to. In a country shaped by decades of segregation, a map of the places least able to fight back looked a great deal like a map of where Black and Latino families lived. When activists later found the report and circulated it, it became one of the most cited documents in the movement, because it said out loud what Warren County residents had argued all along: the choice of site was about who would push back, not only about soil and groundwater.

The Cerrell report also clarifies something about how environmental injustice works in practice. It rarely requires a villain who sets out to harm a particular group. It only requires officials and companies to follow the incentives in front of them. If every siting decision avoids the fight that is most expensive, the burden piles up, year after year, in the places where fighting is hardest. Fixing that does not mean finding bad people. It means changing the incentives: requiring agencies to look at cumulative burdens, giving communities real power in the decision, and making the easy path no longer the cheap one.

That is the policy direction several states have since taken, with laws that require regulators to consider the existing pollution in a neighbourhood before approving one more source of it. Those laws are the long-delayed answer to a question first shouted on a North Carolina road.

The objections, taken seriously

Some people who look at Warren County make a fair point: the state needed to put the PCB soil somewhere, and any site would have had neighbours. If the landfill had gone to a mostly white county, wouldn't those residents have protested too?

They might have. That is part of the answer, not a rebuttal. The pattern the Warren County organizers identified was not that only Black communities ever got waste. It was that communities with less political power, often Black, Latino, Native or poor, were more likely to be chosen, less able to stop it, and less likely to get heard when they objected. A wealthier county with more lawyers, more officials in the state capital and more newspaper coverage has a better chance of pushing a project somewhere else. Over decades, the somewhere else becomes predictable.

A second objection comes from economists: maybe waste sites are put on cheap land, and poor people, disproportionately people of colour because of past discrimination, move to cheap land. Which came first, the dump or the neighbours? That question generated serious academic debate in the 1990s. Later research found that, in many cases, the facilities came first and the siting decisions themselves reflected race. But the more useful point is that the outcome is unjust either way. If a family ends up next to a landfill because housing discrimination left them only the cheapest land, the injustice did not disappear; it moved one step earlier.

Afton's lesson for organizers now

Warren County is often described as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. Many organizers would push back gently on that: Black, Latino and Native communities had been fighting pollution long before 1982, in Houston, in farm fields where pesticides poisoned workers, on reservations with uranium mines. What Warren County did was join those fights to the language and tactics of the civil rights movement and win national attention.

The lesson for today is not that protest always wins. At Afton, it lost the first battle. The trucks got through. The lesson is that losing a battle with the whole country watching can still win the argument. The people who lay down in that road knew they were likely to be carried away. They did it anyway, and the record they created outlasted the landfill.

There is one more lesson, about who gets to be a leader. The people at the heart of the Warren County fight were not national figures. They were church members, farmers, mothers and teachers who decided their county was worth defending. That is still who carries most of this work.

What you can do

It is worth remembering, too, that the people of Afton were not asking for anything exotic. They wanted clean well water, a voice in a decision about their own land and the same consideration a wealthier county would have received without asking. Those are modest demands, and they are still the ones being made.

The question Warren County asked, who has to live next to the danger, is answered every year in permit decisions most people never hear about.

1. Look up the regulated facilities in your area. The polluters page shows EPA-regulated facilities by ZIP code, with their violations and penalties. Start with your own neighbourhood, then look at a community a few miles away and compare.
2. Support the groups doing environmental justice work. Local and state organizations need members, volunteers and donations. The organizations directory lists nonprofits by cause and state, including environmental and civil rights groups.
3. Follow the movement's current fights. The environmental justice topic page collects news on siting fights, federal policy and the communities organizing around them.
4. Speak up when a permit comes up for comment. Federal agencies open some permits and rules for public comment. The list of rules open for comment shows which ones close soonest and how to write a comment that a reviewer will take seriously.

The trucks reached the landfill in 1982. The people who stood in their way are the reason we now ask where the next one goes.