WARRENTON, NC (AP) — Forty years after a predominantly black community in Warren County, North Carolina, protested against the creation of a hazardous waste site, President Biden’s top environmental official Saturday visited the site, widely credited as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement applies to a national office that will distribute $3 billion in block grants to underserved communities burdened by pollution.
Along with civil rights activists and participants in the 1982 protests, Michael Regan, the Environmental Protection Agency’s first black administrator, announced that he would devote a new layer of leadership to the environmental justice movement they were creating.
The Bureau of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights — currently made up of more than 200 employees in 10 U.S. regions — will bring together three existing EPA programs to oversee a portion of Democrats’ $60 billion investment in environmental justice initiatives funded by the… Inflation Reduction Act were created. Pending confirmation by the Senate, the President will appoint an Assistant Administrator to lead the new office.
“In the past, many of our communities have had to compete for very small grants because the EPA’s fund was extremely small,” Regan said in an interview. “We’re going from tens of thousands of dollars to developing and designing a program that will distribute billions. But we will also be sure that money will reach those who need it most and those who have never sat at the table.”
Biden has championed environmental justice as a centerpiece of his climate agenda since his first week in office, when he signed an executive order pledging 40% of total profits from certain federal clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities overwhelmed by pollution.
Now, Regan said, this new office is tying environmental justice into EPA’s core fabric, putting it on par with other top offices like Air, Land and Water, and cementing its principles in a way that will outlive the Biden administration.
North Carolina designated Warren County, a small black farming community on the Virginia border, in 1978 as a dumping ground for truckloads of soil laced with highly carcinogenic chemical compounds that later contaminated water supplies.
When the first trucks rolled into town in 1982, hundreds of residents flooded the streets, blocking their way to the landfill. Though unable to shut down operations after six weeks of nonviolent protests and more than 500 arrests, their efforts have been hailed by civil rights activists as sparking a global uprising against environmental racism in minority communities.
