A real estate broker says an organization denied her the opportunity to purchase land in an Arkansas development because of her Jewish ancestry, and because she has a Black husband and biracial children, according to a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court.
The lawsuit, filed in Arkansas on behalf of Michelle Walker, names Return to the Land, a development whose owners have said they must personally confirm that applicants are white before they are accepted, its Ozarks chapter and five officers. It says Return to the Land founders are “explicitly attempting to establish an all-white community.”
The lawsuit also calls Return to the Land a white nationalist organization and says it's in violation of federal and state fair housing and civil rights acts.
“Its founders believe that white people are genetically superior to other races, advance the view that Jewish people are engaged in a plot to eliminate the white race, and advocate for segregated white communities for the purpose of creating a separate all-white nation state that will help avoid ‘white genocide,’” the lawsuit said.
For decades, Blacks and other minorities were restricted from buying or renting homes in some neighborhoods or areas due to racial covenants built into mortgages and leases. Prospective homebuyers also faced redlining in which mortgages and loans were denied based on race.
Walker, a real estate broker who lives in St. Louis, applied to buy land last year in the town of Ravenden, Arkansas, due to its below-market price. Ravenden is about 150 miles (241 kilometers) northeast of Little Rock and just south of the state line with Missouri.
She was asked questions during the application process about her ancestry, religion and her family, according to the lawsuit.
Walker is white and belongs to a Christian church. Her Jewish ancestry is on her mother's side.
She is represented in the lawsuit by the Relman Colfax law firm, the Legal Defense Fund, and Legal Aid of Arkansas.
Return to the Land did not respond to an email Wednesday from The Associated Press seeking comment on the lawsuit.
On its website, Return to the Land promotes itself as a private membership association “for individuals and families with traditional views and common continental ancestry." In addition to the its Ozarks Regional Chapter which covers parts of Arkansas, Missouri and eastern Oklahoma, Return to the Land says it has chapters around the United States.
After reports that Return to the Land was eyeing the Springfield, Missouri-area for a whites-only community, Springfield’s city council said in a Facebook post last July that there was no place in the city “or anywhere, for such a divisive and discriminatory vision.”
Pennsylvania’s state House in April passed — by a ultra-slim vote of 101-100 — a bill to block the creation of whites-only housing communities. House Bill 2103 followed Return to the Land’s believed intention to expand to Pennsylvania and other states.
The legislation now is before the Pennsylvania Senate.
Williams is a member of The Associated Press Race & Ethnicities team. He reported from Detroit.
FILE - An Arkansas flag flies in the wind as snow falls in Fayetteville, Ark., Feb. 1, 2011. (AP Photo/Beth Hall, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Elon Musk announced plans Wednesday for one of the biggest stock sales ever by taking public a space company that is currently losing billions of dollars year.
A filing shows that his SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year, too.
The prospectus did not put a dollar figure on the amount Musk hopes to raise, but various reports have put it at $75 billion or so. An offering of that size would easily surpass the current title holder, Saudi Aramco, the oil giant that went public seven years ago and raised $26 billion.
SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has said the money will help finance projects to put people on the moon and Mars in its quest to make humans an intergalactic species as they face existential threats that could wipe out civilization.
“We do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs,” the filing states.
The prospectus reads in part like a Hollywood fantasy version of the future, detailing in one section how part of Musk’s compensation will be granted only if he maintains “a permanent human colony on Mars with at least one million inhabitants.”
Short of that, the stock sale alone could make Musk, a major owner who founded SpaceX in 2002, the world’s first trillionaire. Forbes currently puts his net worth at $839 billion.
In addition to making reusable rockets to hurl astronauts into orbit, SpaceX has other businesses, some successful, some struggling — and with plenty of questions marks.
The document shows that Starlink, the world’s largest satellite communications company, is a big source of cash for the company, generating $4.4 billion in operating income last year. The business uses 10,000 satellites in low orbit to provide internet service to 10 million people in 150 countries and territories.
Among the struggling businesses are two Musk units that were recently acquired by SpaceX — his social media platform X, formerly Twitter, and his artificial intelligence business, xAI. Those purchases were blasted by some SpaceX investors as bailouts because they are big money losers.
The prospectus said its AI business lost $6.4 billion in operations last year.
The original SpaceX business, making rockets and staging launches, has been helped by massive government contracts, which raises questions that could come back to haunt the company. Given Musk’s close relation to the Trump administration, government ethics lawyers and watchdogs have asked if he has gotten special treatment to win taxpayer money and whether that good luck will run out once President Donald Trump is out office.
SpaceX has won contracts worth $6 billion from NASA and the Defense Department and other government agencies in the past five years, according to USAspending.gov. The company noted in its filing that a fifth of its revenue last year was from the federal government.
Musk was the biggest donor to Trump’s presidential campaign and is still a big backer despite their sometimes rocky relationship after his stewardship of the government cost-cutting effort called DOGE early last year.
Like many corporate CEOs, Musk’s compensation will go far beyond his annual salary, which was $54,080 in 2025 and has remained unchanged since 2019, according to the filing.
The prospectus says stock grants for him would be sliced into 15 nearly equal amounts — 67 million shares each — and would vest only as the company achieves preset market cap goals. In addition to the Martian colony, SpaceX’s stock market value would have to reach $7.5 trillion for him to receive the full award.
He would get even more stock awards if SpaceX manages to get giant data centers the size of football fields in space.
The document shows Musk will be able to exert big control over the business.
It says he and certain other shareholders will receive shares in a special class of stock that gives them 10 votes for each share they hold. Those shareholders will be able, among other things, to elect a majority of the company’s board of directors.
“This will limit or preclude your ability to influence corporate matters and the election of our directors,” SpaceX said in a warning to prospective investors.
SpaceX will be able to pitch the offering to investors — in what’s known in Wall Street parlance as a “road show” — 15 days after making its prospectus public. In this case, that works out to June 4.
Associated Press writer Alex Veiga in Los Angeles contributed.
FILE - Elon Musk attends the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2026. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)
SpaceX's latest version of it's mega rocket Starship is prepared for a test flight from Starbase, Texas, Wednesday, May 20, 2026. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
