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Landfill May Settle Alongside History |
Sunday, July 23, 2000
Lowndesboro, Ala. --- The four-lane rural highway between Selma and Montgomery winds past endless acres of pines, abandoned gas stations, remote barbecue joints, parched rows of corn and 54 miles of civil rights history.
Inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in March 1965, thousands of marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma and reached Montgomery four days later, demanding the right of black people to vote.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that August. Activists revere the path as holy ground in the civil rights movement. President Clinton has declared the highway a national historic trail.
Now, some of the ground is about to be trashed. After two years of community debate, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) has approved a landfill permit on the same highway where two demonstrators were killed, one a month before the historic march, one a day after.
On telephone poles along U.S. 80, modern protesters have posted white placards with black letters: "Don't trash our treasure!" One is staked near a historic marker on Frederick Douglass Road, named for the famous black man who escaped slavery and spoke eloquently for abolition. Opponents have gathered nearly 1,500 signatures on petitions. They've gotten support from Ed Martin, a black Birmingham politician running as a Republican for the state's 7th Congressional District seat. The Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment has filed a complaint against ADEM with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. In a county of 12,000 residents, blacks outnumber whites about 3-1.
The San Francisco civil rights group alleges ADEM has allowed a string of landfills to be built in mostly black communities, which it contends violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
On the other side, local black leaders --- including some who marched in 1965 --- support the landfill as a jump-start for the county's lagging economy.
"I don't think it's going to affect the historical trail because it's far enough off the road," said Lowndes County Commission Chairman Joe Frank Brown, a black who marched from Selma in 1965. The commission approved the landfill two years ago.
"Right now, the economy is kind of slow," Brown said. "We're trying to attract industry."
Just west of Montgomery, Lowndes County is among the poorest places in Alabama. What's not covered by grazing land is covered by pine trees. A GE plastics plant is the county's biggest industry, but there's not much beyond that.
Landfill owner Lanny Young estimates his business could generate $300,000 to $500,000 a year for Lowndes County, which operates on an annual budget of about $1 million. Young will pay the county $1.50 for every ton of garbage hauled in.
"There's nothing else that could come into Lowndes County and produce that kind of revenue," said Young, a Montgomery businessman, who purchased the property expressly to build a landfill.
To ease local concerns, Young said he's worked with Brown and county probate court Judge John Hulett, another black political pioneer. Young's company, Alabama Disposals Solutions, will construct the landfill at least 1,000 feet south of the trail. Young said the $4 million facility could be completed within four months.
"You won't even be able to see it from the trail," Young said. "I'm sure we're OK with the people in the community."
But Mark Moody is not one of them. Moody runs the Marengo Plantation, a 165-year-old antebellum house in Lowndesboro that's used for private dinner parties.
A mostly white town in mostly black Lowndes County, Lowndesboro boasts several antebellum homes with white columns soaring to second-floor balconies. The doctor who owned the Marengo Plantation during the Civil War found a young man with acne, showed him to would-be Union raiders on their way to meet General Sherman and convinced them his "patient" was Lowndesboro.
Moody, a white developer, said future tourism generated by the trail will be an economic boon that makes the landfill unnecessary.
"If we used another national treasure --- say, Arlington National Cemetery, Mount Rushmore, the Washington Monument --- and any entity proposed a solid waste landfill next to that, it would never get out of the box," Moody said. "It would be completely shut down. There would be no consideration given to it."
In approving the permit Thursday, the state environmental department said there were few technical problems with the proposed landfill.
"We received comments opposing the landfill, but the overwhelming majority of them involved issues outside the agency's authority," said Jim Warr, ADEM director. "We felt that, under our regulations, an additional public hearing was not warranted because these issues have already been addressed by the Lowndes County Commission."