David Caldwell Jr. - On Environmental Advocacy (clip)

Blanche Brown: So, as far as the struggle that the Rogers Road community is facing, are there any comparisons or similarities between the Civil Rights Movement in Chapel Hill, do you think? Or just any thoughts?

David Caldwell Jr.: I think the weapons have changed, but the battle still goes on. We have had to fight, of course theirs was through solidarity and peaceful, nonviolent methods. We have to go in a direction of educated, or education, and understanding the rules and using those rules. In the past, they made sure you didn’t know what was going on. We would go to meetings and be treated with such disgust and disdain, looked down upon and talked to with just no respect, like, “Here they come again. Geez, get ‘em out of here!” We’d show the brown water and it was, “Well, they can drink it, but my kids can’t drink it, but their kids can drink because they’re used to it,” and this type of thing. We’d tell them that, “You said that you were going to have this done last month at the last meeting,” [and they’d say], “I don’t remember that. Show me where I said that.” And we were not smart enough to say, “Hey, no, show me where you didn’t say it.” Or we weren’t brave enough, or confident enough to actually stand up and talk back. So once we started the collaboration with UNC and the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, and WERA, the West End Revitalization Project up in Mebane. Several other different organizations, working with them and learning, [like] Engineers Without Borders. Several others would come in, and we’d get educated to the point of, “How do you do water samples yourself? How do you do soil samples? How do you transport it? How do you label it? How do you read it? How do you do a Power Point?” How do you…? You know, we had to start from ground zero. We were lucky enough to get in with some of the scientists and some of the legal people. And then we would go to a meeting and it was like, “This water is bad and blah-blah-blah.” “Well what’s in it?” Before we were saying, “we don’t know but it looks bad, tastes bad, smells bad,” but now [we could say] that it has E. coli, frequent E. coli, MTBE, which is a petroleum based – [and the council would say] “And where are you getting all of this from?”. Dr. Haney from Engineers Without Borders, who helped us do the study, we had a guy from State that came out and helped us do the samples, we had students from AWB (Academics Without Borders) help us label the bottles. And it’s “Oh, okay, well alright.” So they knew then they had to listen. And then he would get up and speak, and [they’d say] “and legally that’s not right anyways.” What do you mean? How are you going to tell us what’s legal or not legal? “Well, Mr. [Mike] Dorosin from the UNC Center for Civil Rights is here and he says it’s not legal. Mr. Dorosin would you come up.” And he’d lay it down, and it was like aw man. So then they’d go to, ‘Who are they bringing in with them tonight? We got to listen to them.’ The students were being upset, saying “this is not right, this what you’re doing. We did this study and here it is.” The professors were backing it and the university was backing it, and so we started to get a little bit of respect. Which like I said was a lot different than what they [original Civil Rights Movement] had to do. Theirs was done through costing them money. Ours was done through education, and showing that this is wrong, and this is why it’s wrong, and what you need to do to correct it. Once you have the publicity, you’ve got them backed into a corner.