In September of 1982, a two-lane road in Warren County, North Carolina filled with bodies. Men, women, and children lay down in front of dump trucks carrying soil laced with toxic chemicals, knowing the trucks might not stop for them and the state troopers sent that day were there to clear the road rather than protect anyone on it. Over five hundred people were arrested over the course of six weeks. The landfill got built anyway. By most measures, that should have been the end of the story. Instead, Warren County was the catalyst that sparked a national—and eventually international—conversation surrounding systemic environmental harm.

Dollie Burwell, Charles Lee, and Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis, Jr. were each present for different founding moments of the Environmental Justice Movement. This piece traces the lessons they’ve learned as movement leaders on the interplay between environmental justice, social justice, and American democracy. In each of their tellings, offered independently of one another, one claim reverberates: environmental justice and democracy are not independent. Voting, representation, and narrative serve as persistent movement mechanisms regardless of place or time.

The Power of Civic Protest: Dollie Burwell and Warren County

The story of Warren County, North Carolina’s ascension as a shining example of the interplay of democratic and environmental organizing does not actually start in 1982 with the PCB protests that launched the Environmental Justice Movement. It began four years earlier with the now (grand)mother of the movement, Dollie Burwell, and her friend Hattie Rudd, going door to door registering Black voters in a county that was majority Black and had never, in its history, elected a representative government. Before she galvanized her small community around a basic understanding of their inherent right to clean water, soil, and self-determination, Burwell built her foundations in the organizing traditions of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s. She was raised in a segregated school system, marred by false “school choice” policies designed to circumvent the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in the U.S. South; she was accustomed to receiving the torn, outdated, and marked-up hand-me-downs of white schools. Guided at every turn by faith in hers and her community’s worthiness in the face of cumulative harms, she turned to the power of electoral politics as a strategy for change. By the time the state announced it would site a PCB landfill in Warren County, Burwell and Rudd had already registered thousands of new voters, their actions establishing critical infrastructure for the next few years of movement-building.

Read the full article about environmental justice movement building by Cameron Oglesby, Dollie Bullock Burwell, Charles Lee, and Rev. Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. at Counterstream.