'Whites-only' Arkansas town sued for discrimination

A remote community in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas for "whites only" has been sued for discrimination after the community rejected a woman's application to buy a home there. 

Michelle Walker, the woman who applied to buy the property, said that the organization that runs the community has discriminated against her because of her race and religion. Walker is of Jewish ancestry. The organization that runs the community, Return to the Land, denied her from living there.  

Walker is also married to a black man and they have biracial children. The 160-acre settlement's president, Eric Orwoll, told CNN that in order for people to live in the community, “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 when reporters spoke to the leader over Return to the Land. The lawsuit filed by Walker claims that Return to Land believes that white people are superior to other races and that they want to create an all-white nation to avoid a so-called "white genocide."

Orwoll said that he wanted to form the community “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 added.

The community leader said that he had concerns that the US may not have white people in the majority, and cited growing up in LA, where he said he felt out of place with so many other people of color.

On the application form, according to the lawsuit, the community asked Walker “if she belonged to ‘any other white nationalist organizations.’”

When she got the application back on the group's portal, it said she was “not an ideal fit” for Return to Land.

Orwoll said, when CNN interviewed him, that he did not view it as a problem that they were barring non-white people from moving into their community. “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.”

He added, “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.”