Origins, Archives, Forms: Revisiting the Warren County PCB Protests

he 1982 protests in Warren County, North Carolina, against the establishment of landfills for soil contaminated by illegally dumped PCB (polychlorinated biphenyl) are often cited as the beginnings of the environmental justice movement (EJM).The decision to site the landfills in Warren County was made in 1978, not because of the site's physical safety for PCB disposal-in fact, as scientists and activists correctly identified nearly as soon as the site was chosen, soil composition and groundwater levels made it risky, susceptible to leaching, and the EPA had to waive standard requirements to approve the location-but because the area and its residents were marked as socially disposable, predominantly black and poor, a "sacrifice zone."The movement against the landfills began with unsuccessful legal challenges led by a group of residents concerned with health effects.As the struggle progressed, black community members, political leaders, and churches became more involved, and the strategy shifted from legal action to civil disobedience.In September 1982, as the trucks containing the PCB-contaminated soil approached the landfill site, a well-organized activist front began a six-week protest, marching to the landfill from a nearby church every day while blockading the trucks.Hundreds of people were arrested over the course of the campaign.Though the protests did not succeed in blocking the landfills, they did capture national attention, articulate the concept of environmental racism, and catalyze the emergence of the EJM.In particular, they led to two influential studies on environmental racism: one issued in 1983 by the General Accounting Office after a request by Walter Fauntroy, House of Representatives delegate for Washington, DC, and chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, who took part in the Warren County protests by invitation; the other, the United Church of Christ's Commission for Racial Justice (UCC CRJ) seminal 1987 study Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which proved that race was the strongest predictive factor-even more than class-for the siting of toxic waste, and helped generate a unified framework for the diverse national and global struggles against environmental racism that were picking up speed in the 1980s and 1990s.