How everyday people started a movement that's shaping climate action to this day

Deborah and Ken Ferruccio were driving in their red truck down a rural North Carolina highway one night in 1978 when they suddenly came upon big yellow signs reading: "Caution, PCB chemicals spilled along roadways." There was a three-foot swath of a brown substance along the sides of the road that was smelly and seemed toxic.

"I was very confused because I knew something about chemicals and I didn't know exactly the specifics on PCBs, but the signs indicated they were very serious," Ken says.

Immediately they wondered if the danger was airborne, and whether they should close the windows — or open them. Should they be worried about exposure at all, since they weren't in direct contact with the sludge?

Ken didn't know what to do.

"And it was literally like the awakening of our lives," Deborah says.

They were shaken by the experience. But it was just the beginning of their encounter with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs — highly toxic human-made industrial chemicals used in factories. The more they learned about PCBs, the more concerned they got. And then they organized to fight back.

All around the world, there's a tragic history of industries dumping their waste or setting up their most hazardous facilities in communities viewed as politically powerless or less likely to protest their presence.

But the people of Warren County found that they were not powerless. Fueled by the spirit of the civil rights movement, they challenged their own political leaders over the toxic chemicals being dumped in their community. In the process, they helped birth a national movement, one that would eventually put environmental justice on the national agenda — and is shaping the fight for climate action today.

In 1977, when the Ferruccios left Ohio to move to a small town in Warren County, North Carolina, they were English teachers trying to connect with another version of America — quieter, more integrated with nature, not in the city.

"We moved here knowing it was far different from anything we'd experienced," Deborah says.

Warren County is right on the border with Virginia. It is lush and green in the warm months, the classic image of the rural South. But it didn't take them long to recognize it was a classic Southern county in other ways, too.

Warren County was majority Black, and one of the poorest in the state — and it was segregated. But Deborah says the segregation was different from what they had heard about.

"The people had learned to live with each other and next to each other and depend on each other," she says. "And so there was a kindness that went on. And we saw it in our students. We saw it with the families of our students. And yet there was a racial divide. There still is a racial divide, just as there is across the nation."

A year into living in Warren County, the depth of those divisions and the idyllic view they held were fully challenged — starting with those yellow caution signs.

What are PCBs?

PCBs are human-made industrial chemicals used in factories. They are highly toxic, can cause skin lesions, and are associated with several kinds of cancer.

But why were they being illegally dumped in Warren County on the side of the highway? This question tortured the Ferruccios. So they went searching. And they found that they weren't the only people in the county who were concerned.

"I saw it on the side of the highway and it looked greasy. it was substance there that I knew shouldn't be there,"

The Rev. Willie T. Ramey is a nativeof Warren County. He's a former principal at the middle school and was a pastor at two local churches. One night, shortly after the toxic dumping was discovered, he got a call from someone asking him to meet in a barn at midnight.

He didn't like the idea. But he was curious.

"I go into the barn and I look around, and there is nobody there that looks like me," he recalls.

There were five other people. Two of them were the Ferruccios. All of them, except for Ramey, were white. They told him they wanted to organize and they needed his help.

"The people of Warren County are by no means cowards," Ramey says. "I personally feel, along with other Warren County citizens, that a person who has nothing to die for has nothing to live for."

Springing into action

That illegal dumping of toxic waste in Warren County ended up sparking local residents, fueled by the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, to fight back. In the process, they helped birth a national movement, one that would eventually help put environmental justice on President Biden's agenda and is shaping the fight for climate action today.

The guys who had dumped the PCBs along the road back then in Warren County — and in 13 other North Carolina counties — were caught. They did some jail time. But they left a big problem for the state, which had to come up with a plan to bury all that contaminated soil — tens of thousands of tons of it. And the state chose Warren County.

A statement from the state government — that it was moving forward with its plan to build a toxic waste landfill in the Warren County town of Afton regardless of public sentiment, regardless of whether the people wanted it or not — was all over the news, including a local NPR station. The state would present its plan at a public hearing.

When the Ferruccios found out, Deborah and Ken stayed up all night looking through a whole carload of newspapers, filling two notebooks with information about the dangers of PCBs.

"We had information about the problems of hazardous waste all over the place. We did not have Google," Deborah says. "We had two notebooks."

PCBs had been a problem in the U.S. for a while. The federal government had just passed laws about how to handle and dispose of them. They weren't just linked to cancer. They remain in the air, water and soil for a long time. And they can travel long distances.

Because of all that, it was expensive to get rid of them, which some suspect is why they were illegally dumped along the roads in the first place. The Ferruccios also learned about other places around the state and country where industrial waste was a problem.

They shared what they had learned at that midnight barn meeting. And the group came up with some urgent messaging.

They created a fact sheet and took it door to door. They gave it to businesses, and to ministers to share with their congregations. And in just two weeks, all kinds of people had joined the opposition to the landfill. There were local pastors, education leaders, business leaders, members of the local NAACP.

"A white farmer came in with a John Deere cap with a pipe in his mouth and twinkling eyes, and he says, 'We just wanted to let you know the Afton Gun Club is with y'all.' And we're like, whoa, OK, come on in, have a cup of coffee," Deborah says.

'We will not hesitate to go to civil disobedience'

People were joining the fight for all kinds of reasons. Some were worried about their health. Or their home values. Or about the stigma of having a toxic landfill nearby and how that would affect business. Warren County was already one of the poorest counties in the state.

For Ken, it was a matter of principle. It was the statement he had heard on the news, that public sentiment would not deter the state from building the landfill.

"You're talking about basically dumping some of the most dangerous chemicals known to man and concentrating them in Warren County, North Carolina, and doing that without public sentiment," he says. "You're preempting choice here. You're preempting the very essence of democracy here."

He wrote a letter saying as much to the editor of The Warren Record, which published it.

The letter brought exposure to the grassroots campaign just two weeks before the public hearing for the landfill project.

The Ferruccios and Ramey helped form a group called Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, and Ken was chosen as their spokesperson.

He got a call from Chip Pearsall, a reporter for the News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., asking what he'd do if the state went forward with the plan.

"I said, 'Chip ... we will do all we can through due process of law, but failing that, should these attempts prove fruitless, we will not hesitate to go to civil disobedience.' "

The idea of civil disobedience was in the zeitgeist, part of Vietnam War protests, farmworker strikes, womens' rights and the civil rights movement. And the language Ken was using was no mistake. Soon, the residents would take it to the next level.

Something worth dying for

The stage was set for the public hearing on Jan. 4, 1979. It took place at the National Guard Armory, a big brick building a few miles from where the landfill was supposed to be.

It had seats for 700 or 800 people, and as it began to fill up, there was standing room only. A local public radio station broadcast the meeting live from the armory.

State officials told the crowd that the landfill would be safe, and that science backed them up. But the state also had asked the EPA for three waivers, one of which would allow the landfill to be closer to the county's groundwater than the EPA usually allowed.

"They presented their plans of how they were going to build this state-of-the-art landfill that would never leak," Deborah says.

But a local scientist, Charles Mulchi, was working with Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, and he had taken his own soil samples. He said the state's plan didn't hold up — that the landfill could leak into the water table.

92 people signed up to speak during the public comment period, including the Ferruccios. But Ramey's comments might've gotten the most love that night.

"There are times when there is something worth dying for, especially when you believe that it is right, and I believe that we are right.," he said. "And if this means that we have to stand bodily in front of the trucks, the bulldozers, and the road scrapers, even if we have to give up our lives so that somebody else can live many years in the future, I say that it is our duty to sacrifice that."

"He took the house down," Deborah says.

Everyone got their turn to speak. No one got cut off. The meeting didn't end until 2:30 a.m.

Warren County residents felt like they had momentum. National media had picked up the story. But the man whose government was responsible for choosing Warren County in the first place, Gov. Jim Hunt, hadn't been at the hearing.

The Ferruccios knew they had just a few weeks before the EPA was supposed to decide whether to approve the state's plan, and they felt strongly that they needed to appeal to the governor in person.

So Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs requested a formal meeting with Hunt — and they got it. With that meeting two weeks away, they started circulating petitions. Thousands of people signed.

Deborah and Ramey were among the nine county delegates chosen to meet with the governor on Jan. 19, 1979.

The state government had been sending residents mixed messages. People were told there was no immediate danger — but that animals shouldn't graze nearby. Residents living near the spills got leaflets about the hazards of PCBs, and the state was testing crops and even taking people's blood samples. It had already tried to contain the toxic dirt along the roadsides.

Gov. Hunt had said it was too expensive to move the tainted dirt out of state, but the toxic waste had to go somewhere.

For Ramey, whose family had lived in Warren County for generations, this fight was part of a struggle he'd experienced his whole life.

"This was against the backdrop of when we were tear gassed," he says. "When they did turn the dogs loose. Not being able to go into a restaurant. This was just another civil rights fight."

That was on Ramey's mind at the meeting in Raleigh when he turned to ask Hunt a question: "What will the state do when this problem gets to the point of civil disobedience? Will we be tear-gassed? Jailed? Firehosed?"

Deborah recalls, "There was this long pause, and he finally said, 'We have not considered that.' It's like, well, you will be."

Joining the movement

For many Warren County residents, protesting the landfill was the first time they had protested anything. That wasn't the case for Dollie Burwell, who grew up in the county next door: Vance County. She has been called the mother of the environmental justice movement.

"I attended segregated schools," Dollie says. "Growing up in that environment and having to move on the other side of the street to make sure I didn't get called the N-word, or being pushed or shoved, I saw how unjust that was. So my experience really formed my zest for justice."

When she was 13 or 14 years old, the only Black doctor in her community at that time, Dr. James P. Green, established the Vance County Voters League.

This was the early 1960s, and like many other parts of the Jim Crow South, it was hard for Black people in Vance County to register to vote. So Dollie and other young activists would go door to door to get people registered.

This kind of organizing was especially important in a place where the people in power didn't look anything like the majority of residents.

The sheriff was white, the county manager was white, Dollie says. There were no Black people on the school board, and just one out of five county commissioners was Black.

"Even though we were predominantly Black, we'd never elected a representative government. So we had no political power," Dollie says.

So in June 1979, when the EPA approved that toxic waste landfill site in the town of Afton despite the residents fighting against it, it sparked something in Dollie.

"I remember the exact day. I was feeling sad and helpless. I cried. And then, I got angry."

Dollie, unlike the Ferruccios, was used to organizing within the church.

"Particularly in the Black church. I knew that organizing a Black community started with organizing in a Black church," Dollie says.

On Sunday mornings, church pastors always gave her an opportunity to speak, she says. She told people that she felt the reason the area was targeted for the landfill was because it was predominantly Black. She told them that to fight against the dump, the first step was to register to vote.

A passion for justice

In the wake of the 1979 EPA decision, there were lawsuits to try to stop the PCB landfill, but none of them worked. Three years later, in 1982, construction on the site began.

The protests continued, and the meetings residents were holding moved to a new space — Coley Springs Baptist Church.

"Coley Springs was very close to where the dump site was," Ramey recalls — just two miles down the road. "The sanctuary was larger; more people would be able to come."

Many white people — including the Ferruccios — had never been to a Black church. Even the idea of religion taking a bigger lead in organizing was new.

People showed up. And they were showing up because people like Dollie Burwell had figured out a way to reach people "the old-fashioned way," Dollie Burwell says — door to door, church to church, friend to friend, cousin to cousin.

They weren't trying to start a movement, she says. The movement started on its own, with the passion for justice.

It was understood that the county being mostly Black and poor probably had a lot to do with why the PCBs got dumped there and why the landfill was now being built.

"My mother used to always say that God didn't call us to love justice. God called us to do justice," Dollie says. "And even if you have to stand by yourself, you gotta stand up and do what you know is right."

The week that bright yellow dump trucks started hauling PCB-laced dirt to the landfill; a protest march was in the works. The plan was to have a rally at the Coley Springs church, have a prayer, and then march to the landfill site.

Dollie had gotten her young daughter, Kim, ready for school that day and had seen her off to catch the bus. But Kim ended up right back inside the house. She wanted to protest, too.

Dollie recalls her daughter saying: "Well, Mama, if you go, I wanna go. If you can stand up, why can't I stand up?"

"And then I said to myself, you know, I can't in good conscience tell her this is important enough for me to go, 'cause she had marched with me, she had worked that year in the primary, she had passed out literature at the polls, at the precincts," Dollie says. "So she just felt like she was a real activist ... and she wanted to go."

So both Dollie and Kim set off for the march.

A spotlight on Warren County

"It was just a rainbow coalition, really," Dollie says. "It was whites. It was Blacks. It was Native Americans. It was children. It was middle-aged people, it was old people. And I know that it was the first time many whites had ever been in a Black church."

Everybody was pretty quiet as they left the church. Then the singing started.

They sang all the way to the entrance of the landfill — two miles down the road. Chants of "I don't want no PCB, give it to Hunt, don't give it to me" turned into refrains of "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around."

A military helicopter started hovering over the protesters. Tensions began to rise. Ken says it felt like they were going to war.

Wayne Moseley, who grew up in Warren County and had been involved in the movement leading up to that day, says he was unsure of what would unfold. But he was sure the helicopter was there to intimidate them.

"As we approached the landfill, there were highway patrolmen in full riot gear, face shields, baton in hand. We didn't know whether they were gonna beat us or what," Wayne says.

They were met by the commander of the state Highway Patrol.

At that point, the patrolmen started pushing people with batons, so they sat down in the middle of the road.

"I was among the first to be arrested," Wayne says. "I know I was the first one to be thrown in that hot prison bus, I guess you would call it. They had left the windows up and ... it felt like an oven."

Wayne and others in the bus were brought to the county jail and arraigned. Dollie got arrested, too. So did her daughter, Kim. Video of the 10-year-old crying, wearing a yellow and white T-shirt, tissue in hand, and an officer looming in the back, appeared in media coverage across the country.

"I'm afraid I might catch cancer," she told a TV reporter, crying.

Students from all over North Carolina joined the fight. The protests got bigger. And suddenly, the spotlight was on Warren County as a fight in the Civil Rights Movement.

Setting precedents

National civil rights leaders like Joseph Lowery and Walter Fauntroy joined in.

"It's focusing on local issues and yet being part of a bigger story — Warren County was very successful at doing this," says Eileen McGurty, author of the book Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice.

For the next seven weeks, McGurty notes in her book, trucks brought contaminated soil to the landfill. But people continued to protest and marched, even blocking the road. Some were even arrested.

Sustaining a movement like this is difficult. It can be taxing physically and emotionally. It requires showing up day in and day out. And, most importantly, it requires a lot of people.

"We were never going to flag," Deborah says. "We were a crazy, environmental grassroots fighting force. ... We didn't care who came with us or who didn't come. We were going to keep doing this again and again and again."

Yet despite the weeks of demonstrations, and years of organizing, the protests failed. The landfill was built. The PCBs were put in the ground.

At the end of it all, McGurty wrote that the protests had been staged on 25 separate days, 523 arrests were made, and 7,097 truckloads of contaminated soil — approximately 40,000 tons — were brought to the landfill.

"Mostly people go, well, you lost, you got the PCBs anyway, but it was a good story," Deborah says. "No, it was way more than that. North Carolina was being targeted for waste of all kinds throughout the next three decades. And so we were constantly able to go back to the formula that we had put together organically through research and community organizing. We were setting precedents."

Warren County's political situation changed. People were mobilized, and they voted. Later that year, they elected a Black sheriff and majority Black representation at the county level. Even Dollie was eventually elected as a register of deeds.

And this change has lasted. Warren County has higher voter turnout than the state's average.

Bringing equity to environmental issues

In 2003, over 20 years after the protests, the landfill did get cleaned up. Some Warren County residents still question whether the soil and water are safe after so many years of PCBs sitting there.

But ultimately, the organizing and protests in the late 1970s helped launch a national environmental justice movement that is still going on today and is more important than ever.

The protests raised awareness about how racial and economic inequality make communities more vulnerable to environmental harms, leading to the idea of environmental racism, calls for environmental justice — and now, climate justice.

Warren County helped show that the equity lens is important in environmental issues.

"Without it," says Eileen McGurty, "we are going to reproduce the systems of oppression that already exist and we're going to make the problem worse. We're not actually solving environmental problems."

The Ferruccios have spent the past four decades dealing with waste management issues. They're not a very sexy thing to think about, Deborah says. But poor and minority communities continue to be targeted in their region, so they're going to continue to fight.

Dollie Burwell says she is hopeful. There's just too much to do still to not remain hopeful.

"I really don't have the luxury of not being hopeful. But I have degrees of ... hopefulness. And when my hope gets a little weak, I think about my ancestors. And if they kept hope alive enough to end slavery, to end Jim Crow, and to work through and fight through the civil rights movement, then I have no other reason."

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

• In 100 days, Minnesota plans to be free of ‘forever chemicals.’ Some businesses already are
• Minnesota Power plans to build solar projects in Cohasset and Royalton
• Advancing climate action and racial equity
• EVs are cleaner than gas cars, but a growing share of Americans don't believe it