A community for ‘Whites only’ in Arkansas sued for discrimination

By Cindy Von Quednow, Donie O’Sullivan, CNN

(CNN) — A remote settlement pegged as a “Whites-only” community in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas is being sued for discrimination after rejecting a woman’s application to buy land there.

Michelle Walker, who is of Jewish ancestry, says the organization that runs the community, Return to the Land, discriminated against her by denying her the opportunity to buy land based on race and religion. Walker is married to a Black man and has biracial children, her lawsuit says. She’s seeking unspecified damages, including punitive damages.

CNN visited the 160-acre settlement nestled deep in northern rural Arkansas last August.

At the time, around 40 people were living in the community, and hundreds were applying to live there, Eric Orwoll, the president of Return to the Land, the private member association that organized the Arkansas community, told CNN.

To live in the community, Orwoll told CNN: “You have to be someone who identifies with your European heritage and ancestry. You have to celebrate traditional European values and we get those values from our religious documents within Christianity, within Norse paganism.”

“We do view Jewish origins as having their roots in the near East, and so they wouldn’t fall under the category of European heritage,” Orwoll said last year.

Denying Walker’s application constitutes “blatant and brazen violations of long-standing federal and state fair housing laws,” the complaint states.

The lawsuit claims that Return to the Land’s founders believe that White people are genetically superior to other races and advocate for segregated communities to create an all-White nation that will help avoid “white genocide.”

Orwoll told CNN he formed the association “to facilitate forming communities for people of European heritage.”

“We value our heritage, not just because that’s our race and we’re all about skin color, but also because we care about traditional European music and art and European history, and we want to raise our kids in an environment where all of that is celebrated, not attacked.”

He said it would be “hard to deny” that his heritage is being attacked in modern day America.

Orwoll added he was “of course” concerned about the United States becoming a minority White country, citing growing up in South Los Angeles around mostly people of color and feeling othered.

Walker, who self-identifies as White and belongs to a Christian church, learned the organization was offering land for sale in Arkansas for a low price last summer and was interested in the investment potential as well as the location, where she occasionally vacationed, the complaint says.

When she applied to purchase land in the community, she was surprised to see a series of questions about her ancestry and religion and that of her husband and children, “which she understood as clearly violating federal and state fair housing laws prohibiting consideration of race and religion in a land-sale decision,” the lawsuit states.

The application also asks potential members about their views on immigration, what the organization calls “transgenderism” and segregation.

Still, she completed the application, hoping and expecting that the group “understood the requirements of the law and would not actually deny her the right to buy the land,” according to the lawsuit.

Shortly after completing it, a Return to the Land member interviewed her, asking “if she belonged to ‘any other white nationalist organizations.’” A month later, she asked for an update, to which the interviewer told her “she should not expect her application to be approved.”

The community’s portal says her application was not accepted because she was “not an ideal fit” for Return to the Land, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit, filed by Relman Colfax PLLC, a civil rights law firm in Washington, DC, the Legal Defense Fund and Legal Aid of Arkansas on Walker’s behalf, seeks to stop what they say are the organization’s discriminatory housing practices and obtain relief for violations of several state and federal civil rights laws.

CNN has reached out to Orwoll for comment on the lawsuit.

At the time CNN interviewed Orwoll, the Arkansas Attorney General’s office said it was looking into the project. CNN has reached out to the office for an update.

“A whites-only community is illegal, discriminatory and unacceptable,” Lee Richardson, executive director of Legal Aid of Arkansas, said in the news release announcing the lawsuit.

When CNN spoke to Orwoll last summer, he said he didn’t view any of what he was doing as problematic.

“If I was a private individual and I owned this much land, I could do anything I wanted with it, keep anyone out who I wanted,” he said. “We’re a group of people. It’s our private land together. You’re allowed to freely associate in this country.”

The group could run into legal problems if it was properly incorporated as a town, Orwoll said at the time, adding it wouldn’t be possible for his group to grow the settlement into something more official.

“It’s not possible under current laws. But we can expand quite a bit as a private association,” Orwoll said.

Orwoll anticipated legal challenges when he spoke with CNN last summer.

“We’ll get sued, we’ll get fined, things will happen. That’s why we’re talking to lawyers now and getting ready for it,” he said.

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