NY the birthplace of environmental justice? Fuhgeddaboudit. It was a county in NC.

North Carolinians are used to scrapping with Ohio for the right to call ourselves “first in flight.”

Tuesday night during the Democratic National Convention roll call, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul decided to claim something else that actually started in North Carolina.

“As governor of the greatest state that ever existed — hey, we’re New Yorkers, get used to it,” Hochul said. “From Seneca Falls, the birthplace of the women’s rights movement; to Stonewall, the birthplace of the LGBTQ movement; to Storm King Mountain, the birthplace of the environmental justice movement ; and the birthplace of the labor movement”

But New York isn’t the birthplace of the environmental justice movement.

That effort is widely considered to have started in North Carolina, specifically Warren County. There, residents spent years battling against a landfill that would contain thousands of tons of carcinogen-laced soil.

“She’s mistaken. She can’t claim that. She may claim interest in that, but Warren County is evidently the one on record as being the first,” Eva Clayton, a former five-term U.S. congresswoman and Warren County commissioner, told The News & Observer on Wednesday.

Environmental justice is the idea that everyone deserves clean air, clean water and clean land , no matter their background. It applies to both the decisions to site polluting facilities, as well as enforcement of laws against them. And environmental justice includes the idea that everyone should have the opportunity to be meaningfully involved in the decision-making process around pollution.

Warren County’s claim is clear. The Warren County African American History Collective’s website states, “Warren County, NC, is the birthplace of the environmental justice movement .”

In Warren County, that started in 1978, when then-Gov. Jim Hunt announced that 60,000 tons of soil containing PCBs that had been illegally dumped along North Carolina’s highways would be moved to a field near Afton. At the time, Warren County had the highest proportion of Black residents of any North Carolina County.

Hunt’s announcement was followed by a years-long, ultimately futile, legal effort. Trucks carrying the toxic soil started rolling into Afton in September 1982.

They were met by hundreds of protesters, some of whom laid down in the road in front of the trucks. Local community members were joined by members of national groups like the NAACP and United Church of Christ, including Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., who had been a member of the exonerated Wilmington 10.

At one point, protesters were joined by a leader of the Love Canal Homeowners Association, which formed after the 1978 discovery that their community near Niagara Falls had previously been used as a toxic waste dumping ground with the chemicals threatening residents and causing an abnormally high number of birth defects.

Police made more than 500 arrests over the ensuing six weeks of protests.

Perhaps apocryphally, Chavis is sometimes cited as crying out, “This is environmental racism!” as he was arrested. Richard Lazerus, then a Georgetown law professor, found that the story was likely not true in a 2000 paper. But, Lazerus wrote, Chavis’ work had “ transformed environmental law .”

“The Warren County protest, and Chavis’ arrest were, nonetheless, plainly a defining moment for environmental justice,” Lazerus wrote.

North Carolina moved ahead with the PCB dumping, but Hunt vowed to clean up the site as soon as it was possible. The Warren Record previously reported that the cleanup was completed in 2004.

The Warren County protests weren’t the first time people had battled unequal siting of toxic facilities or landfills. In a timeline of environmental justice history, the Environmental Protection Agency points to earlier protests in Memphis and Houston, but said the Warren County protest is “widely understood to be the catalyst for the Environmental Justice Movement.”

In response to the Warren County protests, the U.S. Government Accounting Office released a 1983 study that found three-quarters of the nation’s landfills were in communities where at least 26% of people were Black and where household incomes were below the poverty level.

That was followed by the United Church of Christ’s landmark 1987 study Toxic Waste in the United States, which found 15 million Black people, 8 million Hispanic people and more than half of all Asian people or Native Americans lived in a community containing a toxic waste site that was either uncontrolled or abandoned.

“When you think about how the environmental justice movement grew , it was first through the courage, through the persistence, and to some sense through the sacrifice of so many people in Warren County. And then other communities joined together to build a movement,” Chavis said during a 2022 lecture at Duke University.

Storm King Mountain was the site of a 17-year effort by utility Consolidated Edison beginning in 1962 to build a pumped hydro storage facility in the Hudson Highlands. Environmentalists defeated the project amid concerns about how its development could lead to the broader industrialization of the Hudson Valley and the facility’s impact on striped bass.

The winding legal battle resulted in a 1965 Circuit Court decision that gave community members standing, or the ability to legally challenge environmental decisions . That decision was written into the National Environmental Protection Act in 1969.

In other words, Storm King Mountain played a vital role in shaping modern environmental law , but it was not where the modern environmental justice movement was born.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan, a Goldsboro native and former secretary of the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality, also calls Warren County as the birthplace of environmental justice.

In October 2022, Regan visited Warrenton, N.C., to announce $3 billion in environmental justice funding to be administered by an overhauled environmental justice office.

Regan made the announcement in front of the Warren County courthouse because it was just miles away from the Afton field that had contained the PCB landfill.

“We’re standing on the shoulders of a lot of giants. I have to say that I’m especially proud as a North Carolinian to know that this national movement started right here in my home state,” Regan told The News & Observer just before speaking on that fall Saturday.

Hey, we’re North Carolinians. Get used to it, y’all.

NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@newsobserver.com

This story was produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and Green South Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. If you would like to help support local journalism, please consider signing up for a digital subscription, which you can do here .