Photograph by Inès Dieleman / Trunk Archive
WORDS BY CAMERON OGLESBY
Reverend William Kearney is always looking to the past to build a better future. It’s natural given his ancestry. He’s from Warren County, North Carolina, the cradle of environmental justice.
In 1982, a congregation of Warren County residents—Black, White, and Latino—came together to protest the placement of a toxic-waste landfill in their predominantly Black neighborhood. Over the course of six weeks, organizers convened at Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church, marched toward the proposed landfill site, and lay in the streets to halt trucks carrying toxic chemicals. It was in a jail cell in Warren County that the term “environmental racism” was coined. The nationalization of this small town’s story gave the movement international prominence.
Although Kearney didn’t participate in the famous protests in 1982, he can trace his ancestry back to the land that Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church, and the landfill that would ultimately pollute the community, was built on.
“[The] environmental justice movement is so wrapped around my family history. That’s what gives me that added passion to be more active and bold in the work I do,” Kearney said.
According to Kearney, during the antebellum period, Warren County was one of the wealthiest counties in the state—estates built on the backs of enslaved folks like his ancestors. His great aunts, uncles, and grandparents were enslaved on one of the many plantations owned by William Kinchen Kearney and his relatives in Warren and Halifax counties. That’s how they got their name. After emancipation, formerly enslaved Black folk purchased up the land that their previous owners could no longer afford. The church Kearney helps run today is built on former land from a Kinchen-Kearney plantation.
As land changed hands, money and resources were stripped from the community. There were attempts to revitalize—most notably, Soul City, a 1970s proposal to build a rural Black-owned utopia, but that was halted due to unsubstantiated allegations of financial corruption. Warren County fell from wealth into poverty and became viewed as a throwaway community. That’s what pushed the state to dump dangerous chemicals there in the first place, just two miles from Coley Springs Missionary Baptist Church and Kearney’s family’s farmland.
“Black people knew that area of the county as Kearney Town,” he said. “So growing up where the landfill is sited, I used to have a great aunt and uncle who live right in that area. They were right adjacent to the landfill. That area was really important to us.”
Despite the magnitude of the 1982 protests, Kearney worries that many Warren County residents, especially younger folks, aren’t acquainted with that history. That’s in part why he founded the Warren County Environmental Action Team (WCEAT) in 2011. The WCEAT is a network of organizations including universities, businesses, and local governments upholding the values and rights called for during the 1982 protests. They uplift the under-told histories of this community, whose story, according to members of the WCEAT, has been used over and over again by the federal government without due investment or reparation for the harm of the landfill.
“[This work] is that much more important now with Justice40 funds and a system that allows us to reimagine the current structures.”
Kearney shares a mission with environmental activists and advocates across the country: to forge ahead with the wisdom of those who came before. It’s best captured by a Ghanaian concept called Sankofa, which has long been adopted by African American communities as a symbol of ancestral wisdom. The Sankofa bird, depicted as an ornate bird twisting its neck back toward its tail, has since become a symbol of environmental justice in the United States.
Starting from the 30th anniversary of the landfill protest in 2012, Kearney began collecting video and audio oral history interviews and archiving them through the Warren County African American History Collective. In the last year, he’s partnered with library staff at UNC-Chapel Hill to develop a traveling historical exhibition that will tour through Duke University, the EPA’s Research Triangle Park Offices, and the University of Mississippi.
Kearney hopes the existing oral histories and the historical exhibition will find a permanent home in a proposed Environmental Justice Center of Excellence that the WCEAT is envisioning. He’s seeking funding from President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative—the administration’s goal of ensuring that 40% of the benefits from certain federal programs, including the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, get earmarked for environmental justice communities. If the center is funded, it will serve as a hub for education, economic development, and history archives in Warren County and North Carolina more broadly.
“[This work] is that much more important now with Justice40 funds and a system that allows us to reimagine the current structures,” Kearney said.
In August 2023, Kearney and WCEAT attended Justice40: A Time for Righteous Investment to help make these dreams a reality. The convening, held in New Orleans and organized by the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice and the Robert Bullard Center for Climate and Environmental Justice, gathered community-based organizations from across the country. Its roughly 250 organizers in attendance, many from predominantly Black and Brown communities, are addressing inequitable pollution exposure, energy access, water infrastructure, and climate impacts across the country. The program hosted workshops, trainings, lectures, and history lessons to help even the smallest of the collective take advantage of the recent influx of federal dollars.
Prominent government leaders like EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, and the Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) environmental justice director Jalonne White-Newsome made an appearance, but its most impactful moments featured ambitious communication between communities. Every free minute in that JW Marriott’s packed conference room was swallowed up, not by big speeches, but by talks of collaboration, mutual aid, and long-term plans for community support.
“This is an unselfish endeavor,” explained Robert Bullard, the father of environmental justice and cofounder of the Justice40: A Time for Righteous Investment Regional Hub Program. “Our Justice40 program started out with 10 organizations, then we expanded that 10 with 10 more, and so on. And the bulk of those organizations are in the Gulf Coast, Southern states where most African Americans are concentrated right now, and where many of the climate vulnerable communities are.”
The South as a whole is a literal hotbed for environmental injustices in the U.S. The region has historically served as a dumping ground for industry and a hotspot for natural resource exploitation in fossil fuels, coal mining, agriculture, and more. According to an October report from the Environmental Defense Fund and Texas A&M University, the U.S. South will see the brunt of climate impacts like flooding, hurricanes, and extreme heat.
“I really want to help my community see our power. We need to rewrite the narrative about ourselves: We’re not poor and voiceless and powerless. We have resources and one important resource is our testimonies, our stories, and our resiliency.”
But the region also has an expansive history of both civil rights and environmental justice advocacy. In a way, it serves as another sort of hotbed for fights for human rights. North Carolina in particular has sat as a shining example of the ways that protest and storytelling can build up the political will of underresourced environmental justice communities.
North Carolinians were outnumbered that week by organizers from Texas, Louisiana, and the other Gulf states. But these were folks who carried decades of organizing experience and multiple generations of environmental justice advocacy, representing the protests that launched the environmental justice movement.
“My hope is that a year from now, every community represented in this room has a story to share that shows success in terms of acquiring resources—resources that can open up paths to community health and wealth and wealth building that might not have existed before this time in this administration,” said CEQ director White-Newsome during the August convening.
This year, WCEAT will develop a strategic plan and proposal for federal funding that includes converting the brownfield land near the closed landfill into a regional hub and headquarters. In addition to showcasing the history of the 1982 protests, the space will be used to monitor the long-term impact of the landfill, provide green jobs training, and develop renewable energy systems in Warren County. The team also plans to use the center as a national consulting space, congregating the organizing expertise of county elders and regional partners into curricula that other communities can use to fight against environmental harm.
“All we want is an opportunity not only to tell our story, but also the opportunity to see how community groups can be engaged in making their own communities healthy,” said former U.S. representative and WCEAT executive board member Eva Clayton during a WCEAT meeting.
Patrick Barnes, a WCEAT Board advisor and one of two science advisors during the 1982 negotiations and the remediation process of the Warren County Landfill, said that their proposal is unique because it’s not a one-off project. Unlike many other communities, which propose a single solar farm or to establish air quality monitors, WCEAT envisions a whole system of value creation: a project that will build out expansive infrastructure for good where structures of harm previously sat.
“I really want to help my community see our power,” Kearney explained. “We need to rewrite the narrative about ourselves: We’re not poor and voiceless and powerless. We have resources and one important resource is our testimonies, our stories, and our resiliency.”
An hour and a half from Warren County, hidden in the rural floodplains of eastern North Carolina, sits another historically Black farming town. But unlike those in Kearney Town, this community’s ancestors have never been enslaved. Piney Woods Free Union, an enclave of mixed African, Tuscoraran, and white ancestry, has thrived for centuries untouched, according to William Barber III, a descendant of Piney Woods. This community represents a history of Black land ownership and self-determination very rarely seen in North Carolina or the U.S. South, he said. Barber III founded the Rural Beacon Initiative (RBI), now a Justice40 Hub Leader, to ensure this ancestral community and similar Black farming communities in the region remain untouched.
“We stand on a foundation that was laid by those who have worked in the community for years. We continue their work so that someone even after us can pick it up when we’re gone. I think that’s the goal: how to sustain and preserve legacy,” said Benjamin Barber, director of external relations for RBI and William Barber III’s brother.
The two brothers, along with their three other siblings, spent their childhoods traveling across North Carolina under the teachings of their father, Bishop William J. Barber II of the Poor People’s Campaign. They witnessed communities caught in cycles of poverty, pollution, land loss, healthcare disparities, and race-based disinvestment. Their upbringing imparted them with faith-based wisdom and an early introduction to the intersectionality of environmental and social injustice.
The Barbers were travelers, but they spent ample time at their father’s ancestral home of Piney Woods. They visited their grandmother on the weekends; viewed the fields that their father, grandfather, and generations before them cared for and cultivated; and learned about the significance of their community as a likely site on the Underground Railroad.
“We don’t necessarily come from any form of great wealth, but we have a great legacy that we have tried to continue,” said Benjamin Barber.
Piney Woods Free Union has recently come under siege. Much of the land surrounding the community has been overtaken by the industrial timber industry, which has converted farmland into lumber monocultures to be logged for nearby paper mills. This encroachment has created concerns about water pollution—a big problem because many residents drink from wells.
It’s also risking their land ownership. Community members have been bombarded with phone calls from the industry trying to buy their property. To make matters worse, many residents inherited their land through heirs’ property—a practice whereby ownership is passed on without a written deed or title. The community fears that the shaky legal ownership could allow others to swoop in and legally claim the property. That’s one reason Barber III founded RBI: to keep their community intact and thriving.
“We’re from these communities, we are these communities. I’d say that’s our biggest advantage.”
Among other initiatives, RBI plans to develop the township’s economy by building out regenerative agriculture, food security, and renewable energy. By implementing a novel financing model, RBI, with help from its technical partners, has already purchased 52 acres of heirs’ property in Piney Woods that will serve as its flagship resilience hub. Its also reconnecting the community with its roots, partnering with Indigenous neighbors to practice seed saving and cataloging their history for the next generation.
“We’re from these communities, we are these communities. I’d say that’s our biggest advantage,” said Michael McLean, director of technology and operations for RBI and a maternal cousin of the Barbers. Although McLean’s family isn’t from Piney Woods, he is excited about how RBI’s work could aid communities like his. A descendant of farmers, McLean’s father and grandfather were both sharecroppers near Lillington, North Carolina. Like many Black folks in the South, his family has experienced land loss, centuries of discrimination and poverty whittling away the relationship with land that Black agriculturists once had. “I want to imbue back in my own family that love for the land and get back to our roots in that collective community vision,” he said.
Although RBI and WCEAT come from different histories and envision different futures, they share roots in preserving and learning from the stories of their ancestors; they’re united in Sankofa.
“The model that the Rural Beacon Initiative’s mission sets out brings it all together. It’s important we talk about building community… and using this whole idea of community ownership in our work,” said Bullard.
On the first and last day of the August Justice40 convening, Bullard took to the stage to emphasize the persistence of environmental justice. He described the work not as a sprint, but as a “marathon relay,” a long-haul trudge with constant baton passing to the next generation of movement leaders. That storied past and long future is why Sankofa is so vital, he said.
That week in New Orleans, the future seemed limitless. With federal agencies in attendance and eager to help, with recent legislation making huge, community-altering projects possible, the excitement was palpable. “Whether we’re talking about solar, or sustainable farming, or the issues of education and training of our young people; having these hubs for energy, or having hubs for climate or green learning … there’s no limit as to how we can develop self-sufficiency,” Bullard said.
Despite the promise of the future, he insists that we mustn’t lose sight of the past—to honor the struggles and achievements of those who came before. “Sankofa: looking back to look forward,” he reiterated. “You are standing on the shoulders of your ancestors.”
Tatum Larsen contributed reporting for this article.
This reporting was supported by the Center for Rural Strategies and Grist’s Rural Reporting Grant and is a part of the Environmental Justice Oral History Project.
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Nourishing Roots in the Birthplace of Environmental Justice
