Building a Movement

Sidedoor

Smithsonian Institution

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4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2023

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

America has a long history of clustering heavy industry and toxic facilities in communities where people of color live. But in the 1980s, a series of events sparked a movement to fight back against these environmental injustices. We trace the history of the environmental justice movement from the farmlands of North Carolina to a watershed moment in the nation's capital.

Guests:

Vernice Miller Travis, environmental justice pioneer; Executive Vice President, Metro Group

Rachel Seidman, curator at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum

Charles Lee, a founder of the environmental justice movement; senior policy advisor, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Side Door, a podcast from the Smithsonian with support from PRX, I'm Lizzie Peabody.
0:24.7	It was late summer of 1982 when a caravan of nearly a dozen dump trucks headed for the farmlands of northern North Carolina.
0:34.7	These trucks may have expected to roll right into Warren County unnoticed, but that wasn't the case.
0:40.7	We will not allow Warren County to become a dark side.
0:45.7	When the state of North Carolina decided to dump 10,000 truckloads of dirt in a Warren County landfill,
0:51.7	the people who lived there turned up in droves to protest.
0:58.7	See, the dirt in these trucks wasn't just dirt.
1:02.7	It was contaminated with polychlorinated by fennels or PCBs, a chemical believed to cause cancer.
1:09.7	I don't want this stuff thrown in my water.
1:12.7	We're marching because we do not want the stuff picked out future.
1:17.7	The government had announced that PCBs were toxic.
1:23.7	Rachel Sideman is a curator at the Smithsonian's Anacostia Community Museum.
1:28.7	I think the state government assumed that poor black people in Warren County would not make a fuss about these toxins being dumped in their backyards, but they were wrong.
1:45.7	The state highway patrol began moving in on the marchers as they approached the entrance to the state landfill.
1:51.7	The signs and chance of the protesters made clear their opposition to having the toxic chemical buried in their counting.
1:58.7	There have been no public meetings, there have been no public hearings, there wasn't even so much as a flyer.
2:03.7	They just got word that this was happening, and they didn't know what to do.
2:08.7	Vernice Miller Travis is an environmental justice advocate.
2:11.7	She says that while most of the people who lived in Warren County were black and didn't have a lot of money or political power, they weren't the easy target the government had assumed.
2:20.7	Many in the area had lived through the recent civil rights movement.
2:23.7	And they just started doing all school civil rights tactic and organizing.
2:28.7	So what did that look like?
	...

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