Events Calendar

“Southern Environmental Justice”

presented by Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis

In this SouthTalk, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Chavis will speak on the evolution of the environmental justice movement, which is often said to have started as a local grassroots movement in North Carolina in 1982. Today the environmental justice movement has grown into a global movement for environmental justice, equality, and equity.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis is an esteemed civil rights leader, global business leader, faith leader, and public intellectual. He was born in Oxford, North Carolina. His family has been deeply rooted in Granville County, North Carolina, as landowners, farmers, educators, theologians, physicians, and activists for more than 250 years. Chavis is the host of The Chavis Chronicles, a television broadcast that airs weekly on PBS.

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.

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.