One Town's Blueprint for Resegregating America
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What prompted the lawsuit against the whites-only town in Arkansas?
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Did you understand who these people were and what they believed in?
Not as well as I thought I did. Who did you think they were? They call it return to the land. So I thought they were, you know, a community of people wanting to return to the land. you know, gardening and communal type of living and things like that. And if you would become a member of their club, you were able to purchase land for a thousand dollars an acre, which as a real estate investor is extraordinarily appealing because that's way under market.
And your husband's black, correct?
Yes. They wanted to have a whites only community. So initially I wasn't really thinking about applying. But then as time went on, the appeal of the investment opportunity, I just couldn't shake it.
So I'm going to level with you. Yeah. I mean, you're clearly a very smart person. So I just want to make sure we understand what the motivation was here. And that's fine.
The motivation was the investment. Maybe there's other white supremacists that want to vacation there on my land. It's like the ultimate experience in capitalism. For me, a good investment's a good investment. It doesn't matter to me who I'm buying it from or who's in that area. This is America. There are people that are white supremacists every place in this country.
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. A real estate investor's pursuit of cheap land has triggered a lawsuit against a compound in Arkansas that'll test whether civil rights laws can still stop a whites-only town from existing in America. Today, New York Times investigative reporter Deborah Kamen on the community that thinks it's got a blueprint for modern-day segregation and why they're convinced that in this political climate, no one is going to stop them. It's Friday, June 5th. Deborah, when I first read your piece, my initial reaction was just, I could not believe how emboldened these people were to start a whites-only community. You've covered real estate, you've covered discrimination, you've covered housing law for many years.
So where should we begin the story of this particular group?
I saw a news report about this community last summer. They're called Return to the Land. Sky News had visited them and also The Forward had done a short article. They're a small community in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. And at first glance, they read like a story about any other group of fringe extremists. But the more I read about this community, the more I was struck by the language they were using was something different. They were actually saying, we know what the laws are in America. We know what the civil rights rules say. And we have found a loophole. And we are going to not just build a community here, but use it as a blueprint that can be expanded across the country.
I am sure that sounds quite shocking to people that thought that the idea of discrimination was a matter of settled law at this point.
Yes, exactly. And it's not that they were trying to go around the law. They were trying to use the law to prove that they had a right to be there. And they're very confident with their ability to continue doing this and not just live in this one community in Arkansas, but actually create other communities exactly like them all across the country. And that raised a very urgent question. Can they get away with this? Is it legal? And if so, what does that mean for other communities who want to do the exact same thing?
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