Throughline - Two Miles Down The Road

Episode Date: October 5, 2023

Deborah and Ken Ferruccio saw the toxic chemical spill while they were driving home late one summer night in 1978: a big smelly swath of brown oil on the side of the road. Reverend Willie T. Ramey saw it too. He was a pastor at two local churches and a respected community leader. And not long after that highway spill, he agreed to meet the Ferruccios just after midnight in a barn in Warren County, North Carolina. The Ferruccios told Reverend Ramey they needed his help. Someone was dumping toxic waste in their county, and they needed to organize. Today on the show: how a group of local citizens in a poor, rural, majority Black community came together to fight an iconic battle for environmental justice – and how their work laid a path that leads right up to today.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. NPR is doing something new. We're dedicating an entire week to stories and conversations about the search for climate solutions. Today on ThruLine, the story of how everyday people started a national movement, one that's shaping environmentalruccio made a big decision. They decided to leave Ohio and move to a small town in Warren County, North Carolina. I moved here because I was looking for a rural community and a beautiful environment. I kind of take along. Here I am.

Deborah was in her 20s, Ken in his 30s. They were both English teachers trying to connect with another version of America, a quieter, more natural one. We moved here knowing it was far different from anything we'd experienced. I grew up in the suburbs outside of Columbus, Ohio, and Ken grew up in a small town, Hopkinton, Massachusetts. But both of us were looking for a place that would give us a feeling to live an integrated life in nature, not in the city. Warren County is in the northern part of North Carolina, right on the border with Virginia. It was lush and green in the warm months,

the classic image of the rural South. We came because of the warmth of the people. But it didn't take them long to recognize it was also a classic Southern county in other ways, too. Warren County was majority Black and one of the poorest in the state. It was also struggling to overcome a history of segregation. The segregation was not like we had heard about from the cities up north. The people had learned to live with each other and next to each other and depend on each other. And so there was a kindness that went on.

And we saw it in our students. We saw it with the families of our students. And yet there was a racial divide. There still is a racial divide, just as there is across the nation. A year into living in Warren County, the depths of those divisions and the idyllic view that they had held would Ohio with our earthly belongings that were mostly books, and we were coming back from a trip from the ocean, and all of a sudden we came upon these big yellow caution signs that said, caution, PCB chemicals spilled along roadways. I was very confused because, you know, I knew something about chemicals and I didn't know exactly, you know, the specifics on PCBs, but the signs indicated they were very serious.

And so Ken starts banging on the window, you know, like, look at the signs. And so I didn't know if they were airborne, should we be closing the windows, should we be opening the windows. This three-foot swath of brown oil that was smelly and toxic. Should we be really concerned about exposures, even if we're not in contact with them? So I really didn't know what to do. And it was literally like the awakening of our lives. Deborah and Ken were shaken by the experience. But it wasn't until a few months later, when they heard a news story, that they grew angry.

I heard on local NPR radio station, WBSP radio, that public sentiment would not deter the state of North Carolina from burying toxic PCBs in the Afton community of Bowen County. What we learned pretty quickly was that PCBs, there were many kinds that PCBs, there were many kinds of PCBs, some more dangerous than others. Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are a man-made industrial chemical used in factories.

They are highly toxic, can cause skin lesions, and are associated with several kinds of cancer. They were ubiquitous. They were all over the globe, and they had been allowed to go all over the globe. But why were they being dumped here, in Warren County, on the side of the highway? This question tortured Deborah and Ken. So they went searching.

And what they discovered was that they weren't the only people in the county asking questions. I saw it on the side of the highway. It looked greasy. It was substance there that I knew that shouldn't be there. This is Reverend Willie T. Ramey. I'm a native of Warren County. I was principal at North Warren Middle School. And he was a pastor at two local churches, which is why shortly after the toxic spill was discovered, he got a call. Asking me to meet and barn at 12 o'clock midnight.

Now, Reverend Ramey, unsurprisingly, didn't like the idea of meeting people who he didn't know in a barn at midnight. But he was also curious. And I go into the barn and I look around and there is nobody there that looks like me. There were five other people. Two of them were the Ferruccios. All of them were white. And they tell him, Well, you're principal, so you know how to organize.

And that's what we have come to do tonight. We have come to organize, but we need your help. Flynn's tap water was laced with dangerous levels of lead. The state knew about it and did nothing. It was mid-March when Earl Wilson got the alert that chimed on phones across Philadelphia, a chemical spill in the Delaware River. Environmental racism means that communities of color, lower wealth white communities, and indigenous peoples get all of the waste, all of the negative things that nobody else wants.

Coal fire power plants, incinerators, petrochemical facilities. For more than a decade, the residents of Uniontown, Alabama, which has a population of about 2,400 people, have lived with the Arrowhead Landfill, which is twice the size of New York's Central Park. When I was elected president with Kamala and her partnership, we vowed to take action on the most ambitious climate and environmental justice agenda in American history.

Starting a few years after I graduated college, I began working as an environmental justice organizer, trying to convince big foundations to invest their money in black, brown, and poor communities and organizations that were fighting to keep toxic facilities out of their neighborhood or to clean up toxic waste in order to protect their health. I got to visit places all across the country doing this work, from New York City to West Virginia to Los Angeles, and I saw this same pattern. Communities living in the shadow of power plants and refineries, exposed to air pollution and toxic chemicals. Children with cancers related to toxic air or water. Middle-aged people who were forced to rely on oxygen tanks to breathe. Toxic sludge running down the side of roads. It was haunting. And what I learned was that all of these communities are

part of a tragic history in the U.S. and around the world, where industries dump their waste or set up their most hazardous facilities in communities they view as politically powerless and less likely to protest their presence. In 1978, in Warren County, North Carolina, a group of local residents, fueled by the spirit of the civil rights movement, decided they were going to fight back. They were going to challenge this history. The people of Warren County are by no means cowards. I personally feel, along with other Warren County citizens, that a person who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for. When President Biden came into office,

he pledged to put environmental justice at the center of U.S. policy, especially when it comes to addressing climate change. Maybe this is because climate change, like many other forms of environmental destruction, tends to impact the people at the bottom of the economic and social ladder first. Look, it's easy to feel paralyzed about what to do about climate change. The problems often feel insurmountable. But maybe that presents an opportunity to put the voices of those most severely impacted at the center of the solutions.

On this episode of ThruLine from NPR, in conjunction with NPR's Climate Week, we're telling the story about how a local group of citizens came together to fight an environmental battle, one that also seemed insurmountable. And in the process, they helped birth a national movement, one that is shaping climate action today and serves as an example of what's possible when people band together

to protect their environment and their lives. I'm Randa Adelkattah. And I'm Ramteen Arablui. Coming up, the people who fought PCBs in Warren County, North Carolina, and changed the world. Hello, you're listening to Eric Massey from Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and you're listening to ThruLine, one of the best podcasts that are available. Thank you so much for all your hard work. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Thank you so much for all your hard work. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels,

with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Part 1. Something Worth Dying For. a plan to bury all that contaminated soil, tens of thousands of tons of toxic dirt. And in December 1978, the state chose Warren County. David Kelly, who has coordinated the cleanup operation, also said public sentiment would not keep the state from buying the land. This statement, that the government was moving forward with its plan to build a toxic waste landfill in Warren County,

regardless of public sentiment, regardless of whether the people there wanted it or not, was all over the news. There would be a public hearing in two weeks where the state would present its plan. When Deborah got home that night, Ken told her the news. I was in town and I brought back a whole carload of my Volkswagen Bugs backseat of newspapers that a friend had been keeping so we could later mulch our garden that next spring. And I said, let's look at the newspapers. We stayed up all night.

By morning, we had two notebooks full of articles. All of a sudden, we had information about the dangers of PCBs. We had information about the problems of hazardous waste all over the place. We did not have Google. We had two notebooks. PCBs had been a problem in the U.S. for a while, and the federal government had just passed laws about how to handle and dispose of them. PCBs weren't just linked to cancer.

They're persistent. They don't break down. They remain in the air, water, and soil for a long time. They don't respect boundaries. They can travel long distances. This could be a situation that could affect our children. And because of all of this, it was more expensive to get rid of them, which some suspect is why they were illegally dumped along roads in Warren County in the first place. And the Ferruccios were learning about all these other places around the state and country

where industrial waste was a problem. The events in Warren County weren't the first by any means, but the picture was becoming clearer. So that brings us back to that midnight barn meeting. And it's here where the Ferruccios shared what they found with the small group, including Reverend Ramey. I didn't know what it was. I just knew it was an oil substance on the highway. And I learned

after this night that it was actually PCB. So we got together and we came up with a message. And we were able then to create a fact sheet that we then took to people door to door, gave it to businesses, gave it to ministers to share with their congregations. We had to make that announcement urgent. And then we, as a group of citizens from Afton, met and ripped up the telephone book, the teeny little Warren County telephone book, and each took a page. And in just two weeks, all kinds of people joined the opposition to the landfill. There were local pastors, education leaders, business leaders, members of the local NAACP. A white farmer came in with a John Deere cap with a pipe in his mouth and twinkling eyes.

And he says, we just wanted to let you know the Afton Gun Club is with y'all. And we're like, whoa, OK, come on in, have a cup of coffee. People were joining the fight for all kinds of reasons. Some were worried about their health or their home values or about the stigma of having a toxic landfill nearby and how that would affect business. Remember, Warren County was already one of the poorest counties in the state. It was really a question of principle for me. For Ken, it was the statement he heard on the radio. That's what got me. That public sentiment would not stop the state from building the landfill. Public sentiment is the very ground of democracy. Now you're talking about basically dumping some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man and concentrating them in Warren County, North Carolina.

And doing that without public sentiment. You're preempting choice here. You're preempting the very essence of democracy here. To the editor, I am writing in response to the state's recent plan to turn Warren County into a dumping ground for PCB and other industrial waste. And so I immediately wrote a letter to the Warren Record. Everybody reads the Warren Record.

It's the New York Times in Warren County. What will the present generation of children someday say of Warren County and the generations of children to follow? And I reminded the people that public sentiment is the very cornerstone of democracy. The will of the people expressed through their public sentiments, that's the foundation. And the will of the people is a true source of political power in a democratic society. So we had a lot of exposure with that letter and then things developed. Those two weeks before the public meeting were the beginning of a grassroots campaign. The Ferruccios and

Reverend Ramey helped form a group called Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs. And in late December, about a week before the meeting, Ken Ferruccio was chosen as a spokesperson for that group. That night, when he got home from the meeting, he got a call from a local reporter. I opened the door and the phone's ringing. It's Chip Pesso. Reporter for the Raleigh News and Observer. And he's going to ask me the baby question. Ken, what are you going to do if the state goes forward with the plan? Do you anticipate militancy, Ken?

I said, Chip, it'll be due process first, then civil disobedience. There can be no question about that. We will do all we can through due process of law. But failing that, should these attempts prove fruitless, we will not hesitate to go to civil disobedience. That statement programmed the next four years. The idea of civil disobedience was already in the air. It was part of the Vietnam War protests, farm worker strikes, women's rights movements, the civil rights movement. And the language Ken was using was no mistake. Soon, the residents would take it to the next level.

The crowd is still coming in. You can hear them in the background. It's quite noisy. The stage was set for the public hearing on January 4, 1979. It took place at the National Guard Armory, this big brick building a few miles from where the landfill was supposed to be. The state brought in truckloads of folding chairs, and even then it wasn't enough. It had seats for about 700 or 800 people, and as it began to fill up, there was standing room only. The purpose of this hearing is to try to determine if PCB burial at the site being proposed in Afton can be done safely. A local public radio station broadcasts

the meeting live from the armory. This is a reading from the transcript. At this point, it's the people of Warren County against the state of North Carolina. And from the news coverage of the last several days, it's become apparent that nobody, but nobody in Warren County has come out in favor of this plan except state officials. State officials said the landfill would be safe, that they had science backing it up. But the state also asked the EPA for three waivers. One would have allowed the landfill to be closer to the county's groundwater than the EPA would have normally allowed. They presented their plans of how they're going to build this state of

the art landfill that would never leak, blah, blah, blah. Warren County citizens concerned about PCBs had their own scientist. He was a local guy named Charles Mulcahy, who took his own soil samples and said the state's plan didn't hold up, that the landfill could leak into the water table. Then when the people had a chance to speak, they were speaking knowing that they had the scientific facts behind them. And then 92 people sign up to speak. And then the people spoke.

Is it right to pour a dangerous chemical on a county because it is small and poor? What conclusions are we to draw from reading the sign that states, Caution, PCB chemical spill on shoulder. We must look out for our children. I would like to ask at this time that every person here who is a resident of Warren County and who favors the establishment of a PCB dump in Warren County, please stand. May we have the record reflect that no one stood. There were business and church leaders, educators and neighbors. The Ferruccios both spoke.

Debra was quoted in the New York Times as saying, Warren County was chosen because residents were few, poor, and black. The speaker who got the most love might have been Reverend Ramey. There are times when there is something worth dying for, especially when you believe that it is right. And I believe that we are right. Here he is reading a transcript of exactly what he said that night. If this means that we have to bodilessly stand in front of trucks, bulldozers, road scrapers, even give up our lives so that someone else can live many years in the future, I say it is our duty to sacrifice that. He took the house down.

They did not cut us off. They let us all speak. And the meeting didn't end until 2.30 in the morning. We left really proud of that event. Warren County residents felt like they had momentum. There wasn't just local coverage of the issue. National media picked up the story too. But the man whose

government was responsible for choosing Afton and Warren County in the first place, Governor Jim Hunt, he wasn't there. And Ken and Debra knew they had just a few weeks before the EPA was supposed to decide whether to approve the state's plan. We feel like if he's going to do this to us, he needs to meet with us in person. So as a formal group, the citizens concerned about PCBs requested a meeting with Governor Hunt. And they got it. What we did was, between the public hearing on the 4th and between this meeting with the governor on January 19th,

which was two weeks, we circulated petitions. And thousands of people signed them. Debra was one of nine delegates from Warren County chosen to meet with the governor. Also in the caravan down to Raleigh was Reverend Ramey. White, powerful business people and politicians have decided they're going to dump PCB on us. And we're the ones that are going to have the cancer. So we've got to fight against it. And if we don't fight against it, who's going to fight against it?

And it's not that the state wasn't doing anything. The Transportation Department already tried to contain the toxic dirt along the roadsides. Health departments sent leaflets about the hazards of PCBs to people living near the spills. The agriculture department was testing crops. But the messages were mixed. People were told there was no immediate danger, but that animals shouldn't graze nearby. And they were taking blood samples from people too. Meanwhile, the state was struggling to find a solution, saying it was too expensive to move the dirt out of the state. But the toxic waste had to go somewhere.

So, Warren County. And for Reverend Ramey, whose family had lived in Warren County for generations, this fight was part of a struggle he'd experienced his whole life in North Carolina. This was against the backdrop of when we were tear gas, when they did turn the dogs loose, not being able to go into a restaurant. This was just another civil rights fight. And that was on Reverend Ramey's mind at the public meeting in Raleigh when he turned to ask the governor a question. What is the state going to do when the problem magnifies itself to the point of civil disobedience? Will we be tear gassed? Will we be jailed? Will we be hosed?

Shot with electrical cattle prong, attacked by vicious dogs, shot or killed. The governor, he sat there, and there was this long pause, and he finally said, we have not considered that. And I was like, well, you will be. Coming up, things escalate in Warren County,

and the entire nation is put on notice. Hey, this is Chex from Bowie, Maryland, and you're listening to The ThruLine from NPR. We just want to take a moment to shout out our ThruLine Plus subscribers. Thank you so much for your support. If you don't already know, subscribing to ThruLine Plus means you get to listen to our show without any sponsor breaks. And you also get access to special bonus episodes where we take you behind the scenes, introduce you to our amazing producers, and tell you about how we make the show. To get these awesome benefits and support our work here at NPR, head over to plus.npr.org slash ThruLine.

Part Two. Cousin to Cousin My role in the environmental justice movement in Warren County really began even before the PCB dump was cited. I attended segregated schools. All of our books from the time I was in elementary school, cleaned up until I graduated from high school, was hand-me-down books from the white schools. Growing up in that environment and having to move on the other side of the street to make sure I didn't get called the N-word or being pushed or shoved.

I saw how unjust that was. So my experience really formed my zest for justice. This is Dolly Burwell. She's been called the mother of the environmental justice movement. For some of the residents, protesting the PCB landfill would be the first time they protested anything. But this wasn't the case for Dolly, who grew up in the county right next door, Vance County. I was 13, 14 years old, and one of the Black doctors, well, the only Black doctor in our community at that time was Dr. James P. Green. And he had established the Vance County Voter's League.

This was the early 1960s. And like many other parts of the Jim Crow South, it was hard for Black people to register to vote. And so Dolly and other young activists would literally go door to door to get people registered. Dr. Green would gather about eight or ten of us young people, and he had this bus that we would go on Saturday mornings. We started about 10 o'clock, and we would do it until 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoons.

We would go and knock on doors and ask people if they were registered. Sometimes we would do three or four people in one house. Knock on another door. Knock on another door. Dr. Green, he would constantly talk to us about how voting would make a difference and how important that vote was to our empowerment. This kind of organizing was especially important in a place like Warren County, which was majority Black, because the people in power didn't look anything like that. We had no Blacks on the school board. We had a white sheriff. We had a white county manager

on a five-member board of county commissioners. We had one Black county commissioner. Even though we were predominantly black, we never elected a representative government. So we had no political power. So in June 1979, when the EPA finally approved that toxic waste landfill site

in the town of Afton, despite the residents fighting against it, it sparked something in Dolly. I remember the exact day. I was first just totally feeling sad and helpless. I cried. And organizing in the churches. Particularly in the black church. I knew that organizing the black community started with organizing in the black church. I knew that organizing a black community started with organizing in a black church. Calling ministers, visiting churches. The pastors would always give me an opportunity to

to speak on a Sunday morning. Saying to people that I felt like that the reason we were we were targeted for that landfill was because we were predominantly Black. And to fight against this dump, the first method that I wanted them to use was to register to vote. In the wake of the 1979 EPA decision, there were lawsuits to try and stop the PCB landfill, but none of them would work. Eventually, three years later, in 1982, construction on the site began. The meetings residents were holding moved from the courthouse to a new space. As we got closer and closer to the movement, it was clear that the jumping off place for all of us was going to be Coley Springs.

Coley Springs Baptist Church. Coley Springs was very close to where the dump site was. Two miles down the road. The sanctuary was large. More people would be able to come. Yet it was a place that many people, especially white people, including Ken and Deborah Ferruccio, had never been to. Even the idea of religion

taking a bigger lead in the organizing was a new idea for them. This is a rural community, and so Ken couldn't start a meeting without three or four preachers giving a prayer. And he might miss one of them. I'd have to nod him and say, Ken, there's another minister over here. This connection between the moral, constitutional, and spiritual aspects of this battle is what made people feel safe. It was in Coley Springs Baptist Church where the bridge between the citizens group

and civil rights leaders started to take shape. For me and my church, it was more of a political thing than it was racial. This is immoral, it is unjust, it is untamable, and it is a sin for what they're doing. And we cannot stand for it. As we gathered together, there was no Jew, no Gentile. There was no white, there was no black, there was no red. That was not the issue. This was a community in which white people and black people were working on an issue together

in a community that had been historically segregated. I never did say race. We would never have unified the community had I taken a racial position. For us to have focused on environmental racism would have been to divide the people, and we needed a fusion of people. There's this one woman that I spoke with, a white woman.

This is Eileen McGurdy. And I'm currently a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University. She wrote a book called Transforming Environmentalism, Warren County PCBs and the Origins of Environmental Justice. When I spoke to her, she was in her 70s, so she must have been in her 50s at the time. And for her to go to a meeting at Coley Springs Baptist Church was a huge ask. It was just not something that she could even conceive of herself doing. But also, you know, civil rights activists in Warren County weren't necessarily used to having

a white guy like Ken Ferruccio be the leader of the organizing. Even though race wasn't emphasized in the same way it would be today, it was understood that Warren County, being mostly black and poor, probably had a lot to do with why PCBs got dumped there and why a landfill was now being built. From the very beginning, Ken used the language of disproportionate risks and segregational isolation of a community. And as he used these terms, of course, people naturally thought about race. Whatever the messages were, they seemed to be working. People were showing up. And they were showing up because Warren County residents had figured out a way to reach people. The old-fashioned way, word to mouth, door to door,

church to church, friend to friend, cousin to cousin, brother to brother, sister to sister, family to family. We were not trying to fight a movement. You know, the movement started on its own with the passion for justice.

My mother used to always say that God didn't call us to love justice. God called us to do justice. And even if you have to stand by yourself, you got to stand up and do what you know is right. Coming up, dump trucks, protests, and the environmental justice movement is born. This is Jeanette Stewart from Atlanta, Georgia, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 3. Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round State authorities decided to bury the PCBs in one of 100 potential locations. The site eventually selected was a small, economically strapped, and predominantly black county near the Virginia border. And last week, after numerous courtroom battles and amid much protest,

bright yellow dump trucks began hauling the PCB-laced dirt into Warren County. We was going to have a rally at Coles Rain Baptist Church that morning. And we would have a prayer, and we would all march to the landfill. And it was a very somber time because I think many of the people who marched had never marched before. And so it was just a rainbow coalition, really. It was whites, it was blacks, it was Native Americans, it was children, it was middle-aged people, it was old people.

And I know that it was the first time many whites had ever been in a black church. The first day of the protest, when my daughter came, I had got her ready for school that day. I had got her dressed. I walked her outside so she could wait in a usual place for the bus. When I came back, she was back in the house and I really got upset. I was

like, did you miss the bus? What happened? And she said, no, I'm going to the protest with you. And then I said, Kim, you know you can't do that. You know, I don't know what's going to happen. Those trucks are going to be carrying toxic waste. I don't want anything to happen to you. And she was like, well, mama, if you go, I want to go. You know, if you can stand

up, why can't I stand up? And then I said to myself, you know, I can't in good conscience tell her this is important enough for me to go because she had marched with me. She had worked that year in the primary. She had passed out literature at the polls, at the precincts. So she just felt like she was a real, real activist and she wanted to go. And so both Dolly and Kim set off for the first day of protest. On 15 September 1982, trucks

filled with soil from the contaminated road shoulders began rolling toward the landfill in Afton. At 9.15 that morning, over 200 people began a mile-long march from Coley Springs Baptist Church toward the same destination. It's a two-mile walk down there, and nobody had water bottles waiting for us when we got down there. We marched.

Some people later carried their shoes because they were getting blisters, literally. And as we left the church, everybody was really quiet. But by the time we had gotten outside of Cola Spring Church and started down the road, somebody started singing, I don't want no PCB. Give it to Hunt. Don't give it to me. We don't want no PCB give it to Hunt, don't give it to me We don't want no PCB take it to Jim

or don't give it to me We don't want no PCB take it to Jim or don't give it to me But then by the time we had gotten halfway down towards the entrance of the landfill somebody started singing,

Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around. I ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around. Turn me around, ain't gonna let nobody turn me around. We gonna keep on a-walkin', keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom. So we sung all the way to the entrance of the landfill. Tell God we shall not be moved. for you. And as the protesters got closer to the site, the tension started to rise. As we were walking along the two miles, there was a military helicopter hovering over us. This is Wayne Mosley. He grew up in Warren County and

was involved in the movement before the protests began. And on that first day of protest, he was part of the group that walked from Coley Springs Church to the landfill site, unsure of what would unfold. I'm sure it was there to intimidate us. And I felt, my God, we're going to war here. Helicopters flying all over. I just couldn't believe it. As we approached the landfill, there were highway patrolmen in full riot gear, face shields, baton in hand. We didn't know whether they were going to beat us or what. What we were seeing was State Highway Patrol

and National Guard police cars just parked. They went way down the road. We were met by the commander of the Highway Patrol. If you do not cease this unlawful act, you will be arrested. If we did not turn around and go back, we would be arrested. And Reverend White gesticulated to the heavens and said, we get our instructions from the man above. At that point, the highway patrolmen started pushing us with the batons,

and then we just sat down in the middle of the road. Many of the marchers then sat in the road, and the patrol began arresting them and placing them on a jail bus. We laid out in the highway, and I think the highway patrol really did radio the trucks and says, People are laying in the road, so don't bring the truck. The protesters blocked the entrance to the arriving trucks. Nearly 100 officers from the State Highway Patrol, a battalion from the North Carolina National Guard, and a helicopter were waiting for the protesters,

poised to remove and arrest anyone who tried to halt the delivery of the soil. I was among the first to be arrested. I know I was the first one to be thrown in that hot prison bus, I guess you would call it. They had left the windows up. It felt like an oven. And we were brought to the Warren County Jail and arraigned at that time. I felt fully prepared to go to jail. That was the first

time I'd ever been arrested. The day ended with 67 arrests and 46 truckloads of soil. Dolly was arrested, and Dolly's fear of something happening to her 10-year-old daughter, she got arrested too. Despite the arrests, the protests didn't stop. Instead, it only got bigger, thanks to the help of Dolly's daughter, Kim Burwell, and some national nightly news. In North Carolina today, a PCB cleanup operation became an object of protest.

People saw her, this child, crying. Dolly's daughter on the national news. It was a sensational story. Toxic chemicals were dumped in the middle of the night in a majority black community. And now that community was fighting back. So the national media outlets were on the ground the day of the first protest. And that crying child wearing a yellow and white T-shirt, tissue in hand, officer looming in the back, was the image seen across the country. Saying she was not afraid to go to jail, but she was scared for what would happen to her community.

Kimberly Burwell was arrested 10 years old. She's in the fifth grade. I'm scared I might catch cancer. I'm scared I might catch cancer. And that's when we had students from all over North Carolina to come. That's when we had some national leaders to come. The leadership of the effort consisted primarily of whites who owned property near the landfill. But since the dumping began last week, the leadership has shifted to black religious and civil rights leaders

who have sought and received the support of national black figures like Dr. Joseph Lowry, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I wept when I read that within a few short steps from a school, they're going to put PCB. I believe Jesus is weeping today. National civil rights leaders coming to protest and connecting it with national issues. Suddenly, the spotlight was on Warren County as a fight in the civil rights movement. Deborah and Ken both was really very landfill was to bring in national leaders. It didn't matter when you came to join the fight. The fact that you came was all that mattered.

It's focusing on local issues and yet being part of a bigger story. Warren County was very successful at doing this. The marches didn't end after one, two, or even three days. They went on for weeks. It was still the same, you know. We would always have the rally at the church. Those who was comfortable with getting arrested would get arrested, lay in the road. They would remove them, and then the trucks stopped coming. For the next seven weeks, while trucks continued to bring the contaminated soil to the landfill,

citizens protested, marched, blocked the road, and were arrested. We go out again, get arrested, come back. And so after that, you lose calm. I've lost calm. We were never going to flag. We were crazy, environmental, grassroots fighting force. And as I said, we didn't care who came with us or who didn't come. We were going to keep doing this again and again and again. But sustaining this movement or any movement is difficult. It can be taxing physically and emotionally. It requires people to show up day in and day out. And most importantly, it requires a lot of people,

whether directly involved in the movement or those supporting it by other means. Warren County Jail was really, really small. And so the cells were very quickly filled up and the rest of us were put in the exercise yard. They put them in the fence. And we were there all day after around three o'clock they hadn't fed us. And we were hungry. And some of the ladies across the street, they went and fried up some chicken and some biscuits. And they would bring it to the jail. They knew that people would be out in the fence. But the jailers wouldn't let us have the food. So what the ladies did is they got some of these young guys to throw it over the fence. So we would be in the yard and say,

Chunk me a biscuit, or can I have a thigh, or let me have a breast. And over the road and over the fence, the food would come and we ate it. Everybody did what they could to contribute towards this movement. So what happens? What's the result of all those weeks of endless marching and arrests? When they completed the landfill is really when the marching stopped. At the end of the nearly two months,

protests had been staged on 25 separate days. 523 arrests were made, and 7,097 truckloads of contaminated soil, approximately 40,000 tons, were brought to the landfill. Despite the weeks of marching and years of organizing, the protests failed. The landfill was built,

and the PCBs were put in the ground. Mostly people go, well, you lost, you got the PCBs anyway, but, ah, it was a good story. No, it was way more than that, because North Carolina was being targeted for waste of all kinds throughout the next three decades. And so we were constantly able to go back to the formula that we had put together organically through research and community organizing. And so we were setting precedents.

I think the main thing is not to stop even in the face of lots of failures. And you can definitely look at Warren County and see that because, yeah, the landfill got built, the soil was delivered, but they didn't give up. And it changed the political situation in Warren County. People were now mobilized. They voted. Later that year, they elected a Black sheriff and majority Black representation at the county level. Even Dolly was eventually elected as a register of deeds. Getting people out was as much about that landfill as it was about getting people to vote for African Americans in their local community. And this change has lasted. Warren County has higher voter turnout than the state's average. And in 2003, over 20 years after the protests, it finally happened. The landfill was cleaned up.

But Warren County residents still question whether the soil and water are safe after so many years of PCBs sitting there. And ultimately, the years of organizing and weeks of protests helped launch a national environmental justice movement. Even if the battle was lost, a whole movement, one that's still going on today and is more important than ever, came out of what happened in Warren County. The protests raised awareness around the country about how racial and economic inequality makes communities more vulnerable to environmental harms, leading to the idea of environmental racism, calls for environmental justice, and now climate justice. Solving environmental problems cannot

really happen fully until and unless we address inequities. And so the victory really is about framing a problem. What Warren County did was it gave us the beginning. It gave us a way of saying, yes, the equity lens is important because without it, we are going to reproduce the systems of oppression that already exist. And we're going to make the problem worse. We're not actually solving environmental problems. Ken and I have spent the last four decades dealing with waste management issues, issues that are not a very sexy thing to think about, really, when you think about it. But poor and minority communities continue to be targeted in our region. And so we're going to continue to fight for every community of any color. And we're going to continue to tell people, look, we don't need all these chemicals.

I really don't have the luxury of not being hopeful. But I have degrees of hopefulness. And when my hope get a little weak, I think about my ancestors. And if they kept hope alive enough to end slavery,

to end Jim Crow, and to work through and fight through the Civil Rights Movement, then I have no other reason. It's just too much to do to not remain hopeful. For more stories of climate solutions, head to npr.org slash climate week. That's it for this week's show.

I'm Randab Dikvata. And I'm Ramteen Adablui. You've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and... Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Katayama. Peter Balanon Rosen. Akshara Ravishankar. Irene Noguchi. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel, and it was mixed by Robert Rodriguez.

Music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Anya Mizani. Naveed Marvi. Sho Fujiwara. Thanks to Lauren Sommer, Pavithra Basudavan, Sasha Crawford-Holland, Rachel Waldholz, Ariel Redding, Jenny LeBalm, and Richard Ward and North State Public Video for some of the protest audio you heard, and Anya Grunman. Special thanks to Dr. Eileen McCurdy, whose book provided us the script of the timeline during the protest. That book is Transforming Environmentalism, Warren County PCBs and the Origins of Environmental Justice. Thanks for listening.

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