Events Calendar

Our Movement Starts Here: Film Screening and Panel

Ben Chavis, Dollie Burwell, Melanie Ho, and John Rash

Our Movement Starts Here is a feature-length documentary film by directors John Rash and Melanie Ho that chronicles the story of a rural, majority-Black community in North Carolina that made history in 1982 by fighting the state’s toxic landfill, an event that is often said to have sparked the environmental justice movement.

The film will be followed by a conversation with the filmmakers and two of the participants in the film, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis and Mrs. Dollie Burwell.

We Birthed a Movement

Jenny Labalme

Jenny Labalme, who was a student-photographer during the 1982 protests against a PCB landfill in Warren County, North Carolina, will discuss the exhibit We Birthed a Movement, which showcases a largely Black, rural, North Carolina community’s fight to block a toxic waste landfill that culminated in six weeks civil disobedience. Labalme has numerous photos in the exhibit, which is located in the Gammill Gallery in Barnard Observatory, and served on a history subcommittee that advised the University of North Carolina archivists and curators on assembling relevant materials for the exhibit.

Jenny Labalme spent almost two decades working first as a photojournalist and later as a journalist for publications in North Carolina, Alabama, Mexico City, and Indianapolis. Her protest photos have appeared in the Washington Post, the Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, and the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina, as well as in numerous books, scholarly articles, and the documentary film Our Movement Starts Here, produced by the University of Mississippi’s Southern Documentary Project.

SouthTalks is a series of events, including lectures, performances, film screenings and panel discussions, that explores the interdisciplinary nature of Southern Studies. This series is free and open to the public.