Uniontown, Alabama Landfill Battle a Modern Civil Rights Struggle

"Alabama's biggest waste dump inflicts misery on residents of Uniontown, whose complaints to the EPA have gone unheeded".

"UNIONTOWN, Alabama — As Esther Calhoun sees it, discrimination, rooted in the acts of many, has turned this wisp of a town into a dumping ground.

Alabama's biggest municipal-waste site sits on a county road dotted by well-worn homes. Despite objections from a largely African-American neighborhood in Uniontown, the 1,000-acre landfill was approved by a county commission, and operating permits have been issued time and again.

'If this had been a rich, white neighborhood, the landfill would never have gotten here,' said Calhoun, whose sharecropper and slave ancestors toiled on local plantations, explaining why so many of her fellow citizens view the facility as discriminatory.

'They put it here because we're a poor, black community,' she said. 'They knew we couldn't fight back.'"

Kristen Lombardi reports for NBC News August 5, 2015.