In the months before Patrick Brown was born in November 1982, his father, Arthur, lay down on a road near the family’s farm to prevent a caravan of yellow dump trucks from depositing toxic soil in his community. The governor of North Carolina had authorized the dumping of the soil, contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which had been linked to cancer, in the rural county.
A preacher and a farmer, the elder Brown knew the chemicals would likely leach into the sandy loam and clay soil of Warren County, located in North Carolina’s northeastern Piedmont region, up near the Virginia border. He knew they could contaminate the water and make residents sick — and like hundreds of his fellow protesters, he believed that his community was being targeted because it was one of the poorest in the state, populated mostly by people of color.
“That’s my dad right there,” says Patrick Brown, 41, pointing on his phone to a black-and-white photo of his father being arrested. Around 55 years old at the time, Arthur wears a suit, tie, and round spectacles, and he is being carried away by three helmeted police officers, one holding him under each arm, another under his legs. Looking straight ahead, he appears dignified, calm, and self-assured.
Ultimately, the protest was not successful. The state dumped 7,097 truckloads — 40,000 tons — of toxic soil in a Warren County landfill. Though the community was forced to live alongside hazardous waste, their actions gained the attention of prominent civil rights and environmental leaders — and ignited the national environmental justice movement. It raised awareness that polluting industries and toxic waste facilities are often sited in communities of color and established how ordinary citizens can organize to fight back. Many national and international climate-justice actions today, in fact, grew directly out of the model established in Warren County.
The protest also shaped the legacy inherited by the child born a few months later. “That’s how I got my name, PCB — Patrick Chandler Brown,” Patrick says. “I was named after what happened.”
Patrick’s connection to his land in Warren County — and his commitment to building sovereignty for his family and community — stretches back two generations past his father, to his great-grandfather Byron, who was enslaved nearby until the end of the Civil War. Patrick currently operates Brown Family Farms on the land that Byron worked as a sharecropper once he was freed.