One Town's Blueprint for Resegregating America

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**Debra Kamin** (0:26)
Did you understand who these people were and what they believed in?

**Michelle Walker** (0:30)
Not as well as I thought I did.

**Debra Kamin** (0:35)
Who did you think they were?

**Michelle Walker** (0:37)
They call it return to the land. So I thought they were a community of people wanting to return to the land, gardening and communal type of living and things like that. If you would become a member of their club, you're able to purchase land for $1,000 an acre, which as a real estate investor is extraordinarily appealing because that's way under-market.

**Debra Kamin** (1:03)
And your husband's black, correct?

**Michelle Walker** (1:05)
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.

**Debra Kamin** (1:21)
Okay, so I'm going to love it with you.

**Michelle Walker** (1:23)
Yeah.

**Debra Kamin** (1:23)
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.

**Michelle Walker** (1:28)
The motivation was the investment. Maybe there's other white supremacists that want to vacation there, not on my land.

**Debra Kamin** (1:36)
It's like the ultimate experience in capitalism.

**Michelle Walker** (1:39)
For me, a good investment is a good investment. 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.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:58)
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 Debra Kamin 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.
Debra, 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?

**Debra Kamin** (2:58)
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.
At first glance, they read 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.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:34)
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.

**Debra Kamin** (3:41)
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 are 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? So my instincts as a reporter were, well, if they are saying this, I need to go see it for myself.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:15)
So tell me about what you found, what the place is like, what you saw there.

**Eric Orwell** (4:20)
This area up here, this is my spot.

**Debra Kamin** (4:23)
So to get access to this community, I called Eric Orwall. He's one of their two co-founders.