Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina
Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina
Photo collage description: Photo top left corner is David Caldwell, Jr.,he and fellow activists have tried for decades to push local, state, and federal officials to counteract environmental racism. Photograph by Jeremy M. Lange Photograph by Jeremy M. Lange. Photo at bottom left is of a land field- Despite an agreement with the surrounding community, the landfill in Rogers-Eubanks, outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has continued to expand over the past forty years.Photograph by Jeremy M. Lange.
Photo on right side North Carolina State Troopers pick up protesters on the road to the Warren County Landfill in Afton, North Carolina, September 1982. (AP Photo/Steve Helber) These protesters are Black community residents and supporters; they are on the ground refusing to move. The NC state patrol are attempting to pick them up to remove them from the road.
--Warren County NC Is the Birthplace of the Environmental Justice Movement!
Environmental Racism - Dolly Burwell is considered the Mother of the Environmental Justice Movement Against Environmental Racism. Her daughter, Kim Burwell who was nine years old looked at her mother and said, "mom, this seems like environmental racism"
Environmental Justice --Warren County, NC-
The Dumping of Toxic PCP In/near Black Communities Was Fought Against By The Grassroots Organizing Of The African Americans Who Lived In And Near The Areas Where Dumping Occurred.
------------
NY Times Article
Fighting Environmental Racism in North Carolina
By Vann R. Newkirk II - January 16, 2016
On an autumn afternoon in 1972, the people of Rogers-Eubanks, a historically black community just outside Chapel Hill, North Carolina, gathered beneath a tree to witness the end of a dispute. They were led by David Caldwell, Sr., one of Chapel Hill’s first black police officers, in whose back yard they stood. Before them was a delegation of local politicians, including Howard Lee, Chapel Hill’s first black mayor. For the previous five months, the community had been at odds with the county, the city, and the state university over the placement of a new landfill on Eubanks Road. Now Lee made a proposal. In exchange for agreeing to the construction of the landfill, Rogers-Eubanks would receive some of the municipal services that it lacked—sidewalks, water and sewer connections, a community center. After the landfill reached capacity, it would be turned into a recreation area. Caldwell and his neighbors relented. They looked on as an agreement was signed. Chapel Hill purchased eighty acres of land and began development.
More than four decades later, the landfill has been expanded and there is no recreation area. A manhole cover near the site of the agreement serves as a symbol of services not rendered; many of the original residents of the community still lack sewer connections. “The most disgusting thing that I have with Chapel Hill was that it did not follow through with what I thought was an honest commitment,” Lee, who is now retired from public life, told me recently. “Unfortunately, when I left, they had amnesia.” Local residents have been fighting continuously to see Lee’s promises realized, first under the auspices of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association (rena), then with the Coalition to End Environmental Racism (ceer). The movement has spanned generations. David Caldwell, Jr., the son of the man under whose tree the original meeting took place, and who was present there as a boy, is one of today’s activists. “We had to learn how to fight,” he said.
The American environmental-justice movement began in Afton, a small town sixty miles north of Chapel Hill, ten years after the agreement in Rogers-Eubanks. In 1978, Jim Hunt, who would go on to serve four terms as governor of North Carolina, faced one of his first political crises. A local trucker and his sons had dumped thousands of gallons of oil on state roads, rather than disposing of it lawfully. The oil contained polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a class of chemicals so toxic that Congress banned their production the following year. With the support of the fledgling Environmental Protection Agency, state officials—including Lee, who had by then become the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural Resources and Community Development—chose a site in Afton for a landfill to contain the hazardous waste from the cleanup effort.
Warren County, where Afton is located, is one of the most vulnerable counties in North Carolina, with a quarter of its population living in poverty. Like Rogers-Eubanks, it was a landing place for former slaves during Reconstruction, and it continues to have one of the highest proportions of black residents of any county in the state. Four years of litigation, independent scientific examination, and criticism in the local media could not dissuade Hunt and the E.P.A. from disposing of the PCBs in Afton. In 1982, as construction moved along on the landfill, organizations such as the United Church of Christ and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference sent in organizers to assist the protesters there. One of those organizers was Benjamin Chavis, a longtime activist in the civil-rights movement. “Warren County made headlines,” he said. “And because it made headlines in the media, we began to get calls from other communities. But you know that in the eighties you couldn’t just say there was discrimination. You had to prove it.”
In 1987, the United Church of Christ, through its Commission for Racial Justice, prepared a report, “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States,” which provided the concrete evidence that had so far been lacking. The church’s researchers found that race was more strongly correlated with the placement of a hazardous-waste facility than any other single factor, and remained so even when they controlled for income and geographic area. The report also indicated that three of the country’s five largest commercial hazardous-waste landfills, comprising forty per cent of the nation’s entire commercial-landfill capacity, were located in black or Hispanic communities. Subsequent studies of the health effects of living near such facilities have been indeterminate, in part because it is difficult to track residents through a lifetime of exposure. Nevertheless, a review of fifty epidemiological studies, published in 2000, found that increases in self-reported health problems were common, and that adverse pregnancy outcomes, such as low birth weight, genetic defects, and infant mortality, were associated with living near a landfill that handles toxic chemicals. Two decades after its initial report, the United Church of Christ published a follow-up, “Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty.” It found that little had changed in the intervening years; most of those living within 1.8 miles of a hazardous-waste facility today are people of color.
Rogers-Eubanks provides an object lesson in the political and regulatory difficulties that communities of color can face once a hazardous-waste facility is built. For three decades, none of the parties listed on the original deed of sale for the 1972 landfill—the Town of Chapel Hill, the Town of Carrboro, and Orange County—followed through on Lee’s promises. In the same time period, the county requested grants from the E.P.A. to extend water and sewer services to two mostly white communities in the same watershed. Then, in 2007, instead of closing the landfill on Eubanks Road, the board of county commissioners voted unanimously to approve a solid-waste transfer station as an addition to the already sprawling complex. Later, facing stiff opposition from the community and local media, the board backpedalled. According to the Reverend Robert Lee Campbell, the leader of rena and ceer, local governments relied on the legal concept of extraterritorial jurisdiction, which allows municipalities to make decisions about areas beyond their official limits. Even though Rogers-Eubanks citizens could vote for county commissioners, they were politically excluded from Chapel Hill, the town that managed and used the land, and neither the county nor Chapel Hill had any obligation to provide services, aside from places to drop off waste. “Most of the council members didn’t even know where [the landfill] was,” Campbell said.
In 2007, Campbell filed a claim with the E.P.A.’s Office of Civil Rights. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prevents government entities that receive federal funds from discriminating and provides mechanisms by which individuals can seek redress. But as Chavis noted, the burden of proving discrimination is extraordinarily high. An independent review of the E.P.A.’s track record, conducted by Deloitte in 2011, found that the agency had “not adequately adjudicated Title VI complaints.” In its forty-five years of existence, the agency has yet to make a single formal finding of discrimination. It rejects the vast majority of Title VI claims before investigation. At the time that Campbell filed his claim, the E.P.A. had performed no civil-rights investigations in North Carolina since digital record-keeping began, in 1993. Ultimately, the agency rejected most of Campbell’s claim, on the grounds that it lacked jurisdiction, because it had not granted funds to Chapel Hill or Carrboro.
rena and ceer continued their push. In November, 2009, representatives of the organizations were invited to the White House Clean Energy Forum on Public Health to present their case to the E.P.A., which had recently been taken over by its first black administrator, an Obama appointee named Lisa Jackson. ceer activists also waged a grassroots campaign in Orange County. Residents learned how to perform land, soil, and water studies with equipment that they borrowed from university scientists. What they discovered—raw sewage seeping from yards, elevated levels of fecal and E. coli contamination in local water sources, toxic chemicals in the air—was startling enough to bring in investigators from the Orange County Department of Health, whose findings were even more serious than what residents expected. Less than half of all septic systems were in compliance with code, numerous sources of drinking water were contaminated with fecal bacteria, and nine out of eleven wells tested failed to meet health standards.
Finally, in 2012, soon after the E.P.A. announced that it would investigate part of Campbell’s claim, Orange County yielded, pledging to build a community center in Rogers-Eubanks. The following year, county officials decided to extend water and sewer services. The community center was finished in 2014, and engineering studies are under way for laying down sewer and water lines sometime this year. Local, state, and federal officials are finally moving to keep the promises that were made forty-three years ago. Community leaders are pleased with the progress but not yet content. “I don’t feel anybody should fight as long as we’ve been fighting to get something that’s God-given,” Caldwell told me. “It’s not a temporary thing. You fight until the end. You fight until you can’t fight anymore. And that’s my goal, to fight until it’s done.”