Rogers Road
<blockquote>"You’re driven by just wanting to make the community, in a way, like what you had. Where they have a place, a physical place, where there’s beauty around them, you know, environmental beauty, where they’re safe...I want young people to have the same sense of security that we had ."</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><cite>- Minister Robert Campbell</cite></p>
Rogers Road runs between Eubanks Road in the north and Homestead Road in the south. The surrounding land has been owned by Black farmers and homeowners since the nineteenth century. Like much of Chapel Hill, the area grew rapidly in population between 1939 and 1979, and in 1972, Orange County officials decided to locate a new landfill on Eubanks Road, in the heart of the community. Residents in the Rogers-Eubanks area have come together ever since to fight for environmental justice and preserve their community. Despite promises that the landfill would close when it filled up, the County announced plans to expand it in the late 1980s, and approved a waste transfer station at the site in 2006. Residents in the Rogers Road area have dealt with odors, contaminated water, vermin, noise, and more from the landfill for almost fifty years, and continue to fight for the County to close the landfill and ease the environmental burden on this increasingly diverse historically Black community. Neighbors formed the Rogers-Eubanks Coalition to End Environmental Racism (CEER) in 2007 to continue the fight for racial and environmental justice. The Rogers Eubanks Neighborhood Association (RENA) has become a key organization for activism and community empowerment in the area and its community center has become a hub for local residents, offering after school programs, summer camps, and a wide range of community programming.
