Hello and welcome to This Day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, October 1982, protesters in North Carolina are in the second month of a long fight against a toxic landfill in their community.

This is the story of Warren County,

North Carolina, a rural community located in the north of the state. For those of you who kind of know the geography, it's right on the Virginia border, maybe an hour or less northeast of Raleigh-Durham.

Warren County was majority black, about 75 percent most residents at or below the poverty line,

and now in the early 80s it had become a dumping ground for tens of thousands of tons of toxic dirt.

This dirt was full of PCB chemicals, chemicals that were widely used in manufacturing throughout

the 1970s, until they were banned due to their harmful health effects.

In comes the Ward Transformer Company, which is based in Raleigh, which now had to get rid of tons of toxic oil.

We will get into their very sketchy plan for how to get rid of that toxic oil, like Hall of Fame corporate sketchiness,

in my opinion. And then we will get to how all of this implicated the people of Warren County,

who then fought back, mounted protests, and in many ways set the blueprint for fighting back

against what we now have a term for, but didn't really at the time, environmental racism.

Here to discuss, as always, Nicole

Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there. Hello, Jody.

Hey there. This is a remarkable story, lots of twist and turns. And yes, I would say,

Hall of Fame, sketchy behavior. Who would have thought a chemicals manufacturing company

would get to no good?

I do think every time listeners hear Ward Transformer Company, they should boo and hiss at home. Boo and hiss. Okay, great. Yeah, really.

So let me give a little context on PCBs, and then we will talk about how Ward Transformer Company and then this town of Warren, which really kind of steps up in a really remarkable way,

PCBs polychlorinated biphenols. I won't get into the chemical science of what they do, but they're

basically used as like insulators and coolants in transformers and other electrical equipment

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