Above Photo: “Warren Residents Oppose Regional Landfill," front-page, Henderson Daily Dispatch,” by Scott Ragland, March 19, 1992. Inset reads: “It takes Rosa Parks and puts her on the back of the bus once again.” Ken Ferruccio

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If we’re looking for social change leaders to stem the tide of climate change, ordinary citizens must, as Princeton University professor and author Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., puts it, “be the leaders we have been looking for.”

In this episode, Deborah and Ken feature the legacy of such homegrown leaders in the early 1990s, as local and regional officials attempt to turn Warren County, especially the Lickskillet community situated just a few miles downstream from the PCB landfill, into a 1,000-acre toxic trash dumping ground.

This episode relates how ordinary people in Warren County, during a critical time in the county’s history and the history of North Carolina, become the leaders they are looking for, leaders who never claim the legacy they leave.

Some of the many who come to mind are: Cliff Jackson. Susan and Steven Bender. Jean Strickland. Earl Limer. James “Sonny” Davis, and his wife Geneva, neighbors of the Ferruccios, and they are county leaders such as Commissioners George Shearin and Butch Meek.

Warren County isn’t the only place being targeted for commercial dumps open for interstate waste. Sixteen North Carolina counties are being targeted, and Ken and Deborah are speaking out against them, trying to help keep the state from becoming a regional, East Coast, and possibly national waste dumping grounds.

Ken and Deborah go to Wilson County, Governor Hunt’s own home county, where they support local citizens’ efforts to stop an 800-acre commercial landfill, describing the failures of lined landfills and telling the people that with the support from the Episcopal Church, they’re going to prove the PCB landfill is leaking.

Two days later after their Wilson County presentation, Debbie Crane, spokesperson for the North Carolina Department of Environment, Health, and Natural Resources calls Ken and tells him the call is a courtesy call, that it’s only right that he learns the news directly from the department and not from the news media. She discloses to Ken that the PCB landfill has half a million to a million gallons of water in it that are threatening to breach the bottom liner, and something has to be done.

Why after a decade of silence and inaction is the state now describing the water in the landfill as a crisis, and why call Ken? Could it be that the real crisis is that Ken and Deborah have created an Ecumenical Environmental Leadership Coalition and are speaking out about leaking landfills and about waste expansion based on for-profit, commercial regional landfills? Could it be that the real crisis is that the Ferruccios are supporting grassroots leaders even in the Governor’s own back yard?

Above Photo: Bill Kearney and Dollie Burwell unveil the PCB historic marker at the September 15, 2012 30th anniversary PCB celebration held at Coley Springs Baptist Church, (Henderson Daily Dispatch, Earl King)

In this episode, it comes as no real surprise to Ken and Deborah that soon after the North Carolina Public Radio interview they did with “The State of Things,” the local Warren County government is facilitating efforts to plan the 2012, 30th anniversary celebration of the 1982 PCB protest movement. Leading the efforts is Bill Kearney and his newly formed Warren County Environmental Action Team which includes local, state, and federal government affiliates and state university academics and others.

As part of the celebration, Kearney proposes plans to build a park and recreation center on the landfill site, and government affiliates claim the site is safe. Deborah vehemently counters the claim.

Deborah negotiates for months with North Carolina state archivists to convince them to erect a historical PCB marker and to approve the wording for the sign, but the historic marker and the program are “essentially hijacked.”

More than the historic marker is hijacked as part of the 30th anniversary campaign though. The Action Team and its government and academic affiliates feature Kearney as the prevailing spokesperson for the re-narration industry that puts a basket over the light of truth, the basket that Deborah and Ken continue to remove again and again in this podcast series.

Deborah and Ken end the episode as they explain why they could not attend the 30th PCB anniversary Coley Springs Baptist Church celebration in letters to the editor published in the Warren Record soon after the celebration event, letters they know will become part of the public record, part of the history they are living and documenting as they go.

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Click below to see a photo of the PCB historic marker being erected in Afton by state workers while non other than health minister and Warren County Environmental Action Team Director Bill Kearney looks on.

https://www.wcaahc.com/uploads/1/3/8/3/138395702/naacp-memorial-2020-photo_orig.jpg

Ken and Deborah begin this episode with an update on the status of the Warren County Environmental Action Team's proposal for a partnership with county officials to seek EPA Justice40 community grant funds for an environmental justice center in the county based on the PCB legacy.

With EPA grant funding deadlines nearing and with no public engagement in the grant decision-making process, it seems that the Action Team may have decided to dismiss attempts to partner with the county.

Deborah shares excerpts from an October 16, 2024 letter to the Warren Record that address current environmental protection and justice issues in the county.

Ken and Deborah then do something different as they continue to address the people’s PCB legacy by sharing a 2011 interview they had with Frank Stasio, who was host of a WUNC NPR radio program titled: “The State of Things.”

They ask their listeners to go to the top or bottom of this Episode 39 summary page, and click the following link:

https://www.wunc.org/the-state-of-things/2011-10-24/meet-deborah-and-ken-ferruccio

The link can also be found on their website OurRoadtoWalk.com home page about half-way down.

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to address the re-narration of the PCB
history as they contradistinguish fact from fiction.

They explain how the PCB landfill legacy is relevant to everyone because it is part of a crucial turning point for the nation, a watershed that has set precedents which continue to affect economic development, environmental protection standards, and environmental civil rights policies.

They fact-check statements in the recent PCB film titled: “Our Movement Starts Here” and give detailed context to back their positions.

Ken and Deborah recognize that from the beginning of this long PCB saga, the battle to protect Warren County has been a battle for the truth played out through the media.

This battle for the truth is no different today, but the stakes are higher than ever now that the legacy of the PCB environmental justice history is tied not only to disproportionate impacts from pollution, but also to climate justice, and to how we all face increasing environmental stressors and disasters caused by man-made pollution.

Photo Collage: EPA Public Hearing, Warren County Armory, January 4, 1979. Archives. Eight-hundred Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs listen intently to their independent scientist, University of Maryland soil scientist Dr. Charles Mulchi.
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In the Room Where it Happened

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to tie past PCB history to the present as they take their listeners to “to the room where it happened,” to the Warren County National Guard Armory where the PCB landfill environmental justice movement began on a frigid January 4, 1979 night when some 800 citizens voiced their sentiment against a toxic PCB landfill they believed would endanger their lives, their environment, and future generations.

Two weeks earlier the Hunt Administration had announced that “public sentiment would not deter the state from burying PCBs in Warren County,” an announcement that had ignited the people and has come to epitomize the dictatorial politics of poison.

Ken and Deborah take their listeners back to this 1979 Armory space and time, and compare it to the August 22, 2024 public forum they recently attended held in the Armory that was sponsored by the Governor’s Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

They explain how these two Armory occasions were a stunning display of contrasts concerning what the Warren County environmental justice movement was in its natural, unadulterated grassroots form in 1979 and what it has become in its current institutionalized, manufactured, manipulated, and monetized, and greenwashed form.

For Deborah and Ken, and for Warren County citizens who were there that January night, the Armory is sacred space because the will of the people was displayed for all to see, including local, state, and national media.

But the Advisory Council public forum desecrated the space — killed the hot-button topic of environmental justice with death-by-PowerPoint greenwashing. Public comments were initially limited to three minutes, even though only five people attended because of poor advertising.

Warren County Environmental Justice Executive Director Bill Kearney was an Advisory Council panelist. Currently, Kearney is Action Team have pressing county officials to partner with his Action Team for as much as $20 million for a Warren County-based EPA-sponsored environmental justice grassroots center of excellence.

In this episode, as Deborah and Ken move backward and forward on the historical timeline, as they make the case that there is no documented historical justification for such a center in Warren County.

Contrasts abound between the two events, but one thing is the same all these forty-five years later — Ken Ferruccio, the spokesperson still for Warren County citizens who are concerned about a future based on truth and justice.

Concerning the proposed EPA-sponsored environmental justice center, Ken warns Advisory Council members, Bill Kearney, and county, state, and federal EPA officials: “Not the federal government, not the state government, not the local government, none of these, but the people of Warren County, the stakeholders, the taxpayers, will stand on the public sentiment that they’ve always always done. They will decide their future, and they will decide the future of Warren County.

Episode Photo: For this hard-hitting episode, we chose to feature this quote by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Montgomery, Alabama, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, because we agree with him that "an honest engagement with our past is essential if we are to create a healthy and just future."

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to respond to EPA’s Senior Environmental Justice Policy Advisor Dr. Charles Lee’s invitation to Ken to share his ideas — past, present, and future — as part of a “We Birthed the Movement” panel discussion.

They follow where the last episode left off, explaining more about the reversal of the Warren County environmental justice movement, especially as it plays out in the detoxification cleanup process of the PCB landfill.

It’s important to know how and why this reversal in the birthplace occurred because the PCB cleanup process has informed the perceptions of the environmental justice movement at large.

Ken and Deborah share excerpts from a revealing, December, 1998 inside letter from PCB Working Group member Jim Warren, who was and still is Director of NC WARN, the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, to Co-chair Dollie Burwell. The letter follows how the original citizen/state agreed-upon goal of the PCB Working Group — to detoxify the landfill with qualified independent scientific oversight — is reversed, using subterfuge to create a rift in the PCB Working Group.

They remind Dr. Lee of the 1994 statement he wrote on behalf of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in support of detoxification of the PCB landfill with stakeholder decision-making and independent science. They then ask Dr. Lee if he was aware of Jim Warren’s letter concerning the rift in the PCB Working Group.

As they speak to present concerns, Ken and Deborah, address potential allocation of EPA Justice40 community grant funding, especially as it relates to the Warren County Environmental Action Team that has proposed a partnership with the Warren County Board of Commissioners in order to build an EPA-sponsored Warren County-based environmental justice grassroots leadership center of excellence in the county.

Ken and Deborah point out that members of the Action Team have clear governmental and institutional-affiliated conflicts of interest that are antithetical to grassroots citizen interests and that members of the Action Team are not experientially qualified to “develop and implement a grassroots leadership training model based on the PCB landfill struggle,” as Action Team Director Bill Kearney has stated is the objective.

Concerning the vision for the future of Warren County, Ken adamantly makes his point clear:

“An EPA institutional nexus of entangling alliances with the Warren County Environmental Action Team, in partnership with Warren County Commissioners, or any other entity, will not determine the future of Warren County, but the public sentiment of Warren County Citizens — landowners, tax payers, stake-holders —will determine the future of Warren County.”

Ken and Deborah end the episode with this question to EPA’s Charles Lee:

“Would you, Charles, consider coming to Warren County, joining Warren County Environmental Action Team Director Bill Kearney, and sitting down with the citizens of the county as we discuss our visions for Warren County and beyond going forward, as well as, if and how, proposed EPA Justice40 grant monies might best be allocated?”

This photo of Reverend Leon White and Ken Ferruccio, President and Spokesperson for Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, was taken in December 1982, soon after the PCB protest movement as they spoke to audiences on an East Coat Tour organized by Charles Lee and sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.


In this episode, Ken responds to a recent invitation from Dr. Charles Lee to serve as a panelist and to share his PCB experiences and insights at a “We Birthed the Movement” discussion hosted by the EPA-Research Triangle Park Management Council in partnership with the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Special Collections Library and its traveling Warren County PCB archival exhibit. Dr. Lee is Senior Policy Advisor for EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights

However, Ken turned down the invitation because his knowledge of the documented history has little in common with the prevailing “We Birthed the Movement” narrative and because of the inherent constraints of a panel discussion format, so Ken told Dr. Lee he would be responding at length in this upcoming podcast episode.

In this episode, Ken and Deborah share two key historical experiences that they believe describe the trajectory of the Warren County PCB landfill environmental justice movement history, how the direction of the movement was reversed from a grassroots focus to an institutional focus, the reversal also following the arc of Dr. Lee’s environmental justice career.

In order to give context to the analysis that follows, Deborah refers to a leaked EPA memo and to the EPA’s Environmental Equity report that author Robert Bullard describes as part of the EPA’s “outreach strategy” to prevent “minority fairness flashpoints” from happening by “mounting a public relations campaign to drive a wedge between grassroots environmental justice activists and mainstream civil rights and environmental groups.”

Section 1, “The Reversal,” begins soon after the fall 1982 PCB protest movement when Dr. Lee asks Ken and Reverend Leon White to speak about the PCB history on an East Coast Tour sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.

Ken refers Dr. Lee to the 1983 grant proposal he submitted to the Commission for Racial Justice at Dr. Lee’s request that Ken titled,
“An Institute for Environmental Justice,” the purpose which was for grassroots communities facing environmental pollution to work with institutions to integrate coordinate, and focus environmental justice efforts and resources.

Section 2; “The Rift,” focuses on the PCB landfill detoxification process and the wedge that was driven within the PCB Working Group and which created a major environmental justice rift which divided citizens from their right to decision-making power and independent scientific oversight during the PCB cleanup process.

They refer to Dr. Eileen McGurty’s use of the word “rift” in her book Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice, and to her erroneous conclusion that this rift “allowed the state to avoid the sticky problem of the risks from the landfill.”

Ken and Deborah argue that Dr. McGurty’s explanation of the rift was not only erroneous, but it was personally harmful to them, and has the most serious and far-reaching implications for the environmental justice movement to this day.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Than Viet “argues that the way nations remember and re-narrate their pasts isn’t random or coincidental. It’s intentionally curated in memories, monuments, museums, even in key-chains and mugs in gift shops.” He calls this the
“re-narration memory industry.” In other words, they change history.

In this episode, Ken and Deborah examine how the EPA’s environmental justice re-memory industry has and continues to re-narrate the Warren County environmental justice PCB narrative through the use of manipulated language and the efforts of the Warren County Environmental Action Team, a network of organizations and individuals with government, academic, and ecumenical affiliations, led by Bill Kearney.

Now, according to Kearney, the Warren County Environmental Action Team is seeking a partnership with county officials to get substantial EPA environmental justice community grant monies to “leverage the PCB history and the county’s close relationship with the leadership of the EPA” and “to build an Environmental Justice Center of Excellence here in Warren County,” on the PCB brownfield site or somewhere else in Warren County.

With a pot of EPA environmental justice grant monies on the horizon, Kearney, who is a preacher, researcher and consultant, calls for comprehensive assessments of the environmental and health impacts of the PCB contamination.

Ken and Deborah ask:
How, and more importantly, why, would the state have built and the EPA approved a landfill that immediately became such an abject failure in a poor, largely black community? Has an EPA-affiliated research community been preparing for, or is it now seizing the opportunity, for studies of a hazardous waste sacrifice zone, using more than forty years of PCB exposure as part of a research effort?

Could researchers and the EPA, which is captured by the industry it regulates, benefit from learning about the human health risks of long-term exposures to PCBs, gathering human evidence that could be used, for example, by the epidemiological community to set ever-changing legal maximum contaminate exposure levels?

What kind of research ethics are potentially at play here in Warren County today? For forty years, from, 1942-1972, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Public Health Services in collaboration with Tuskegee University, conducted studies on nearly 400 African-American men to learn about the effects of untreated syphilis.

Where will Kearney’s research take him with potential EPA community grant monies? How might a partnership with our own county government further such efforts?