Tim Griffin #racist #wingnut forward.com
Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said Thursday that “Return to the Land,” which bars non-whites and Jews from membership in its northern Arkansas living community, doesn’t violate state or federal law.
“Racism has no place in a free society, but from a legal perspective, we have not seen anything that would indicate any state or federal laws have been broken,” Griffin said in a statement provided to the Forward by a spokesperson.
Griffin’s comments walk back legal concerns he previously expressed about the whites-only settlement. Earlier this month, Griffin told TMZ that Return to the Land — a community where prospective residents must verify their “ancestral heritage” in a written application and interview — raises “all sorts of legal issues, including constitutional concerns.”
The Forward reported in June about Return to the Land’s hopes of replicating its whites-only settlements across the country, with the stated aim of “trying to put land back under the control of Europeans.” Eric Orwoll and Peter Csere lead the group, which Morgan Moon of the Anti-Defamation League described as one of the most established white supremacist residential communities in the United States today.
In a June 30 email obtained by the Forward through a public records request, Gary McGee, an investigator with the Arkansas Fair Housing Commission wrote that “as of today, AFHC has not discovered any actual property owned by this organization or its founder, nor any advertisements for housing.”
Records show that a limited liability company in both Csere and Orwoll’s name, “Wisdom Woods LLC,” owns adjacent parcels of land totaling 157 acres near the town of Ravenden, where Sky News reporter Tom Cheshire visited the group and spoke with residents of the whites-only community in July.
Griffin did not respond to the Forward’s request for clarification about why the office believed Return to the Land had not broken any laws and whether it had considered the property owned by Wisdom Woods LLC.