“The Right to Enjoy the Planet On Equal Terms”: Warren County Marks 42 Years Since Landmark Landfill Protests

Last month at the Democratic National Convention, New York Governor Kathy Hochul took to the stage to lay claim to a few things: “From Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the women’s rights movement,” Hochul said, naming movements she felt New York was responsible for, “to Stonewall, the birthplace of the LGBTQ movement; to Storm King Mountain, the birthplace of the environmental justice movement.”

Hochul was in a groove with alliteration but not the facts: the Environmental Justice movement finds its roots not in the Empire State but deep in the red clay of Warren County, North Carolina, where, in 1982, a landfill was dug for an estimated 40,000 cubic yards of soil laced with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Four years earlier, in 1978, the Raleigh-based Ward Transformer Company was responsible for one of the largest illegal dumpings in United States history. Looking to cut costs and deep-six 31,000 gallons of PCB fluid from its electric insulators, the company quietly dispatched trucks to leak the fluid out alongside 243 noncontiguous miles of rural North Carolina roadway.

The midnight dumping was discovered when residents complained of an oily, smelly substance along the roadway; a few years later, alarming levels of PCB contents were also detected in the breast milk of women living nearby. The state became responsible for the contaminated soil—and then, in short order, offloaded it to Warren, a poor, rural, majority-Black county; all while failing to clear the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) landfill standards that could’ve protected the county’s water table. No matter: In 1979, the EPA waived its regulations and gave Governor Jim Hunt the go-ahead for what he described as the “Cadillac of landfills.” (That same year, the domestic manufacturing of PCBs, which are classified as human carcinogens, was banned.)

It was a tremendous event in state history that could have gone without notice had Warren County not put up a fight. It was a fight that would last several years, beginning with administrative appeals and traveling through a grassroots network of telephone calls and churches, and concluding, in the summer of 1982, with six weeks of civil disobedience and more than 500 arrests. The landfill went in, anyway—this weekend marks 42 years since the contaminated soil rolled into Warren County—but not before the astonishing actions sparked national attention and birthed a movement.

Our Movement Starts Here, a new documentary from filmmakers Melanie Ho and John Finley Rash, screens on September 12 at Duke University’s Human Rights Center and tells the story of the Warren County protests from the ground-level perspective of the cohort of activists alive today. Ho and Finley weave together archival footage and interviews with luminaries like Ben Chavis, Jr., Dollie Burwell, Wayne Moseley, former congresswoman Eva Clayton, and Jenny Labalme (a longtime photographer for the INDY ).

Briefly, the documentary also delves into the story of Soul City, civil rights leader Floyd McKissick’s 1960s-circa dream of a thriving North Carolina hub for Black capital . Tucked in a corner of Warren County, Soul City accrued significant financial support from the Nixon administration and pushback from former US senator Jesse Helms. That pushback, alongside economic setbacks and negative press coverage, brought the experiment down—though it left behind, as the documentary details, a deep sense of community self-determination. Today, the Warren County Environmental Action Team , established in 2012, continues to probe the health impacts of the landfill and serve as a resource for other communities facing environmental injustice.

Altogether, Our Movement Starts Here —currently on the film festival circuit but available online next year—tells the remarkable story of a community that refused to go down without a fight, whose members lay down in the road when the trucks didn’t stop rolling and flung biscuits and chicken wings into prison yards when guards wouldn’t let residents deliver meals to the activists held there.

During our conversation, Rash, who was raised in North Carolina and is an Assistant Professor of Film Production and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi, told the INDY that he hopes the film will both preserve history and serve as an educational and “organizing tool.” It is screening at a Warren County high school this week, helping to energize and educate the next generation about where they’re coming from and where they can go.

INDY : Can you talk about why this coalition was a landmark? Watching the film, it’s striking how multiracial the group is, how strong their commitment is.

RASH: The state of North Carolina had this toxic, contaminated soil that they needed to dispose of. It chose Warren County, the most predominantly Black, economically poorest county in the state, assuming that the folks there probably had the least resources in power to fight against it, which is typical. These folks came together and fought hard for years—first through litigation and trying to work through administrative channels.

But that didn’t work and when [the landfill] finally was coming in, the entire community joined in to engage in civil disobedience for six weeks, to block the trucks with their bodies; children, senior citizens, men, women, people of color. You have folks from marginalized communities, not going to their jobs, standing up against state troopers and not necessarily knowing what the consequences would be, and continuing to do that day after day.

It became a true community effort—multiracial, multi-generational. You had families that were taking turns watching the kids so someone could go to jail one day, and then they would trade off and someone else would go the next. That was why it spread outside of that community and people were paying attention.

It was also that environmental activists and folks from the civil rights activist community came together at this point under a national spotlight for the first time. When people saw that it sparked ideas of what this type of organizing could look like.

How were folks able to galvanize the community?

One thing that the state didn’t count on, in thinking about Warren County, is that it wasn’t a typical rural Black community. We get into Soul City and the fact that less than a decade prior to this protest, you had Floyd McKissick building this multiracial utopian community. Civil rights folks from all around the country had already come to Warren County to be part of this project and prominent leaders from within the state had contributed to that project.

There were already folks there who knew the template. That was why it was important to acknowledge the existence of Soul City, is that that education, the experience, was already there. As representative Eva Clayton and a few other folks said in the film, it really can be attributed back to the history of Soul City just a few years prior to this incident.

It’s pretty powerful to get people to turn out week after week, especially when environmental threats can seem so amorphous. What kind of tactics did they use to organize?

This gets to the beauty of community participation because you had the community college and folks like Ken Ferruccio, who was really interested in the science behind all of this. When you look at the different players involved, you realize that everyone has a different skill set—when it is a community effort, you use the resources that exist in the community. You had folks who had some media training who [could] write press releases, get the information out there. You had people who were lawyers like TT Clayton, Eva Clayton, who were engaged in thinking about litigation and how to work through the government.

And then you had folks like Dollie Burwell and Reverend Leon White, who were working with the United Church of Christ and thinking about how the civil rights movement had engaged these types of things through civil disobedience, through organized sort of national religious networks. In the film, Floyd McKissick Jr. eloquently sums this up saying that there was a synergy in the county at the time.

There were other sites and methods available to the state to dispose of the waste. What were those options and why did the state bypass them?

The first option, in my understanding, was out of state—they were looking at other states that had this type of regional facility, but you had to pay for that and it was cost-prohibitive. They also maybe saw the opportunity that they could become one of the sites, if they found the right site, so that [the landfill] could actually become a money maker for the state.

After reviewing several sites, the two that were on the shortlist were Chatham County and Warren County. I don’t know why it wasn’t Chatham County—there are folks who can speculate on that, but I don’t know definitively. But you can look at the economics of the two counties today—they were very similar in 1982 and they’re very different now. [Writer’s note: It’s difficult to find comprehensive county-by-county data from 1982 but, in 2022, the poverty rates for Chatham and Warren County were 10.4% and 21.2%, respectively; the national poverty rate was 11.5%] .

With Soul City and the landfill going the way they did, do you have a sense of how people in Warren County maintained morale?

There was some fracturing of the community after this happened, which always happens—not everyone who is there while the trucks are rolling is going to stay around once the news cameras disappeared, right? But there were several folks who were completely changed and inspired and they went on to realize the power their voice could have in shaping their communities. So even though they did end up with a toxic landfill, they saw their voices represented in the national spotlight, that they could stop the site from being expanded into a regional site and the governor promised, as the trucks were rolling in, that it would only be for this immediate disposal.

The implicit story of this film is that idea of empowering marginalized voices through public policy and civil engagement. Two months ago, I would not have thought this film would have had as much contemporary relevance as it does right now, thinking about the election and the choices that we have in front of us. There’s a takeaway from this film, that voting matters. Who you vote for and giving everyone a seat at the table matters in terms of leveling the table for communities across the country. They saw that in 1982 with Eva Clayton and Dollie Burwell in particular, but also the folks they elected—the first Black sheriff, and their county commissioners all looked completely different demographically within one year of this protest.

The film ends with footage from the 40th-anniversary event and there’s a moment where the older generation passes the torch to the next generation of environmental justice activists. What issues are those activists contending with now?

In North Carolina, you still have issues with the over-industrialization of hog and chicken farms , coal ash. Those are the two biggest ones. We also have issues of climate change in eastern North Carolina. Climate change and the hog farms: anytime a big storm rolls in, those things come head to head. Just thinking about that part of the state potentially being more and more underwater as time goes on is terrifying—not just to the folks who live there, but in terms of the ecology.

Environmental justice, climate justice—in the end, what you see is that it’s the same communities who have the least power to fight back are always going to be affected the most. The folks who have the resources to move, to take things to court, are usually going to find a way to find an escape hatch. It’s the folks we see—in Warren County, in Duplin County, in places across the country that demographically look like these counties—that are always going to have the most to lose because they have so little ability to fight back.

Last question. Can you talk about the significance of the term environmental justice?

The term “environmental justice” probably had been floating around the movement before Warren County but had not been articulated in the way of Reverend Ben Chavis’ framing of it as environmental racism. The terms are pretty similar, but it is this idea of, everyone has the right to have a healthy and clean place to live, the right to enjoy the planet on equal terms. If corporations and governments are taking that basic fundamental right away from citizens, then that’s where the justice part comes in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity .

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