Environmental Justice Movement Case Study

Beginning of the Environmental Justice Movement In 1982, the North Carolina government decided to place 6,000 truckloads of soil containing toxic polychlorinated biphenyls in the city of Afton,Afton is a small community located in poor, rural Warren County, North Carolina, and at the time, had an 84 percent African-American population. Protesters against sitting the landfill in Afton argued that the sitting decision was discriminatory and was made because the community was minority and poor. According to Dr. Robert Bullard, the Afton PCB landfill site was not the most “scientifically suitable location” because of the high risk for groundwater contamination. Throughout six weeks of protest, more than 500 people were arrested. Many veterans of the civil rights movement from the 1950’s and 1960’s supported the protesters and classified the protest as a new fight in the civil rights movement - the fight against “environmental racism.” The District of Columbia’s congressional delegate …show more content…
The report, released in 1983, revealed that three-quarters of hazardous waste landfill sites in eight southeastern states were located in communities whose residents were primarily poor and African-American or Latino. In 1987, the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice released a comprehensive report examining environmental racism, which is the deliberate placing of hazardous waste sites near or in minority communities. The report claimed to confirm and expanded upon the Government Accounting Office’s findings that race and ethnicity were the most significant factors in deciding where to place landfills, waste and environmentally hazardous facilities. The report states that these sitting decisions were not incidental, but the intentional result of policies at all levels of