Darryl Fears & Brady Dennis
Ben Chavis was driving on a lonely road through rolling tobacco fields when he looked in his rearview mirror and saw the state trooper. Chavis knew he was a marked man.
Protests had erupted over North Carolina’s decision to dump 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with cancer-causing chemicals in a poor Black farming community in Warren County, and Chavis was a leader of the revolt.
The trooper pulled him over. ‘What did I do, officer?’ Chavis asked that day in 1982. The answer shocked him. ‘He told me that I was driving too slow.’
Chavis was arrested and thrown in jail. When the cell door slammed shut, he gripped the metal bars and declared: ‘This is racism. This is environmental racism.’
