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A federal civil rights lawsuit is challenging the development of a whites-only community in Arkansas. As Jacqueline Froelich reports, the segregated settlement is quite possibly the first like it since Jim Crow segregation.
JACQUELINE FROELICH, BYLINE: There's a gated community exclusively for white people in the northeastern Ozarks. It's called Return to the Land, stretching across 160 acres. It was founded by white segregationists Eric Orwoll and Peter Csere. Orwoll says on his YouTube channel, these communities are needed, or white civilization faces extinction.
ERIC ORWOLL: It will be a relic rotting in the ground until some future archaeologist goes back to take a look. If that even happens, or we're just full on "Planet Of The Apes."
FROELICH: Referring to a 1968 sci-fi movie showing primates ruling over human atomic bomb survivors. Orwoll's plans are being challenged by Michelle Walker, a St. Louis realtor. She applied to Return to the Land last year to purchase a property stake as an investment. In court documents, she said she was rejected for having Jewish roots, a Black husband and biracial children. So she filed a civil rights fair housing complaint, claiming discrimination based on race and religion. Her lawyer is John Relman. He's founding partner of fair housing firm Relman Colfax, who's suing the white separatist group.
JOHN RELMAN: I would think that anybody would look at this and say, this is about a clear as an example of discrimination of just blatant, brazen, open discrimination that there can be.
FROELICH: Relman says Walker was alarmed by the racial and religious requirements imposed by Return to the Land, so she's claiming financial and emotional harm and seeks compensation. Return to the Land was registered three years ago as a private membership association. Orwoll says they sell memberships and not property or real estate directly, which he says exempts the group from the federal Fair Housing Act. He denied Walker's claim on X and is asking for donations to protect his new, quote, "neighborhood," which he likens to an intentional community.
ORWOLL: She's attacking us. She's threatening white children with homelessness because if they win this lawsuit, and we're forced to sell this land, the white children living here will not have homes.
FROELICH: Segregated American communities trace back to so-called sundown towns of the Jim Crow era, forcing Blacks in particular to leave white areas before dark, says Kathleen Belew. She's a white power historian at Northwestern University.
KATHLEEN BELEW: And you can see this in the Return to the Land website materials, where they're talking about shared heritage, shared belief system and a sort of looming sense of apocalypse as a reason for bringing together people who are white in a restricted space.
FROELICH: Belew says the current political climate may be contributing to a more emboldened white power movement.
BELEW: The mechanisms for prosecution have been largely defamed by the Trump administration. The FBI is not monitoring these groups the way that it was.
FROELICH: Return to the Land is represented by attorney Jonathan Gross. He represented rioters charged in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and is a former Trump appointee to the U.S. Department of Justice, where he served on the president's weaponization team. Gross did not respond to a request for an interview.
For NPR News, I'm Jacqueline Froelich in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
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