Digital Scholarship and Initiatives

This article, second in a series on Native American activists, features Rhiannon Chavis-Legerton, who was twelve years old when the interview was conducted. Born in Pembroke, she is the daughter of Mac Legerton and Donna Chavis. In 1980, the two of them founded the Center for Community Action, a multiracial organization which combats hunger and poverty in Robeson County.
Rhiannon reflects on the murder of Julian Pierce and other killings of people of color in the mid-to-late 1980's; her parents' battle against the GSX toxic waste treatment plant that was proposed near the Lumbee River; the Center for Community Action's Phoenix Project in Robeson County, which unites Native American and African American teenagers to work together and with elders for economic justice; and her participation in a play, called “Side by Side,” about race relations in Robeson County.