Rogers Road

Rogers Road is a community located in Orange County, North Carolina. It has been suggested that and believed by many local citizens to be an area with a long history of battling environmental injustice.

Since the mid-19th century, the Rogers-Eubanks Community has been home to many African-American families. A great deal of the black-owned family farmland in this area has been passed down throughout the generations. Rogers Road was originally a wagon-track in the late 19th century, and Eubanks Road contained a small school founded by a former slave. The school provided an education for the neighborhood's black children in a time when they had no such opportunities. In current times, the Rogers-Eubanks Community has maintained its rich culture despite being the host to mainly low-income households. The social bonds among the families that formed their roots over 100 years ago have been crucial to the ability of the residents to battle the county and achieve environmental equality.

An organization called Play Street Soccer, an affiliate of the Chapel Hill and Carrboro Human Rights Center, also hosts pick up soccer games for the youth of the area once each week. The organization began hosting games in the spring of 2011 with the hope of empowering children and building community through soccer.

From 1939 to 1979, many new families moved into this historically small neighborhood, buying houses and land and establishing themselves in the area surrounding Rogers Road. Just like most of Orange County at the time, the Rogers-Eubanks Community was moving away from being a small group of tight-knit families and moving toward rapid expansion. Aside from changing the nature of the community, there was one other problem that the county was not well-prepared to solve: garbage. More people equals more garbage, but in the 1970s, the political scene was active and a lot of change was beginning to happen. Along with the formation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in December 1970, the American people were becoming concerned with inflation, racial tensions, conservation, and pollution. This new-found national interest in preserving the environment "called into question the common practice of burning household waste and disposing of waste into…waterways." All of these national concerns were equally existent in Orange County. The issue of race was prominent in Orange High School where many black students were accused of "carrying weapons, insulting white female students, and passing out literature" at school. The school emblem was changed from the "black panther" and ' 'Dixie' ' was no longer allowed to be played at the school's football games due to its racial associations.

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