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Community resistance to environmental injustice is now memorialized on a North Carolina Highway Historical Marker in Rocky Mount.

The marker, commemorating the grassroots Citizens for Responsible Zoning, was dedicated in a ceremony last week and will be installed at the intersection of Kingsboro and Antioch roads in Rocky Mount.

Citizens for Responsible Zoning’s fight for environmental justice began in 1996, when the historically Black community got wind of an IBP slaughterhouse proposed in Kinsgboro: Edgecombe County wanted the industry, but the residents of Kingsboro did not. An IBP slaughterhouse operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, would have brought tractor-trailer traffic rumbling through Rocky Mount and Tarboro at all hours of the day and night.

Citizens for Responsible Zoning members and supporters attended public hearings, objecting to the issues such a project came with: zoning, water demand, waste discharge, in addition to low-paying jobs for the residents of Edgecombe County while the plant’s managers, and higher salaries, would be located in neighboring Nash County.

The opposition was overwhelming, but it was the realization that the water needed to slaughter up to 20,000 hogs per day at the facility was two-to-three times the flow of the Tar River that ultimately killed the project, as described by Attorney Marvin Horton in the 25th-anniversary documentary, “We Can Do Better.”

Former Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Jill Howell was featured in the film, talking about Pamlico-Tar River Foundation’s role in the preventing the slaughterhouse proposal from becoming a reality. The Pamlico-Tar River Foundation and Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation merged in 2015 to become Sound Rivers.

Then, former Pamlico-Tar River Foundation board president Joe Hester played a critical role in stopping the construction of the slaughterhouse.

“We were involved; we went to hearings, but here’s why it was not approved: Sam Carlisle was my law partner, and he grew up in Tarboro. I found out that for IBP to exist, and to slaughter hogs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it would have consumed 90- to 95-percent of all water designated for the growth of Rocky Mount. Sam knew everyone and went to talk to them, and that sank the IBP plan,” Hester said in a 2021 interview.

Hester, along with others involved in the grassroots campaign and ultimate win for environmental justice more than 30 years ago, was invited to speak at last week’s ceremony.