“Return to the Land’s actions constitute blatant and brazen violations of federal and state fair housing laws,” Colfax said in a statement posted to the Legal Defense Fund’s website. “Ms. Walker has been deprived of her housing and civil rights, including the right to purchase land and build housing.”
A real estate broker has filed a lawsuit against a white supremacist organization, claiming that she was denied housing in their rural Arkansas community because she has Jewish ancestry, an African-American husband, and biracial children.
According to NBC News, the lawsuit was filed on behalf of plaintiff Michelle Walker, who is white and Christian. In court documents, Walker’s attorneys describe how Return to the Land rejected her application because the organization is “explicitly attempting to establish an all-white community.”
The Associated Press notes that Return to the Land’s developers say that they must personally confirm that applicants are white before allowing them to live on the group’s 160-acre compound outside of Ravenden, a small community in Arkansas’s predominately rural Lawrence County.
“Its founders believe that white people are genetically superior to other races, advance the view that Jewish people are engaged in a plot to eliminate the white race, and advocate for segregated white communities for the purpose of creating a separate all-white nation state that will help avoid ‘white genocide,’” the lawsuit alleges.
Walker, who lives in St. Louis, Missouri, said she submitted an application to purchase land near Ravenden due to a parcel’s below-market price. She claims she was then asked numerous questions about her ancestry, religion, and family.
In an interview with NBC News in July, the community’s co-founder, Eric Orwoll, explicitly said that Ravenden is only open to white people.
“What we’ve done here is establish a place where we have control over who our neighbors are,” he said. “And that is just for the sake of preserving, you know, our culture… white, American culture.”
Orwoll has described the town’s policy as one of “free association” rather than segregation. Return to the Land’s website describes the group as a “private membership association (PMA) for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry.”
Walker’s attorney, Reed Colfax, claims that Return to the Land’s policies are overtly racist and violative of federal anti-discrimination laws dating all the way back to the Reconstruction era.
“Return to the Land’s actions constitute blatant and brazen violations of federal and state fair housing laws,” Colfax said in a statement posted to the Legal Defense Fund’s website. “Ms. Walker has been deprived of her housing and civil rights, including the right to purchase land and build housing.”
In her lawsuit, Walker said that immediately recognized that Return to the Land’s overt questions about race, ancestry, and religion were likely illegal, but completed the application anyway, hoping that the organization would ultimately decide to abide by the law.
Later on, during another stage of the application process, Walker was purportedly asked by Return to the Land members whether she was part of “any other white nationalist organizations.”
After a month passed without response, Walker contacted the group and was told that “she should not expect her application to be approved.”
“Ms. Walker never received any further communication from Defendants,” the lawsuit states.
Sources
Lawsuit claims Arkansas group rejected woman’s land purchase due to Jewish ancestry, Black husband
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