The 1982 Warren County PCB protest launched the environmental racism movement.

Evidence

The movement against environmental racism, which popularized the term environmental justice, focuses on environmental issues as they pertain to communities of color and the disproportionate risk those communities often face. Most academics and activists trace the beginning of this movement to a 1982 protest against the dumping of PCB-laden dirt in a new hazardous waste landfill in Warren county, North Carolina. Warren county was not only one of the poorest counties in North Carolina, but also had a population that was 65 percent African-American—yet it was chosen to receive this statewide waste. Warren county represented one of the first times civil rights groups and environmental groups worked together on issues important to both. This part of the environmental justice movement was empowered and emboldened by studies in the 1980s and early 1990s that showed not just connections between environmental risk and poverty, but specific connections between race and environmental hazards (USGAO 1983; UCC 1987; Bullard 1990; Bryant and Mohai 1992). — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice, 183

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Grounds the anti-toxics and environmental-racism movements in concrete origin cases relevant to my ‘grafting/infrastructure’ and EJ articles; the Warren County landfill protest is a canonical EJ origin story usable as a grounding example.
• DEFINE: Clarifies that the environmental racism movement, not the broader antitoxics one, is what popularized the term ‘environmental justice’.
• XREF: connects to: The antitoxics movement expanded from Love Canal to many pollution issues. — David Schlosberg, Defining Environmental Justice:…, 181