On November 9, 2021, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Descendants Project, an organization founded to advocate for descendants of people once enslaved in Louisiana’s river parishes, filed a writ of mandamus to declare a decades-old rezoning ordinance null and void and order St. John the Baptist Parish to remove it from all of its maps and records. 

Their suit stems from the 1990 corruptrezoning of a large tract of rural land to industrial use in Wallace, La. In 1996, Lester Millet Jr., former council president of St. John the Baptist Parish, was sentenced to nearly five years in prison for his role in trying to aid Formosa, a Taiwanese corporation, build a rayon pulp factory next to Wallace. Millet engaged in money laundering and extortion and issued threats of expropriation to residents to coerce them into selling their land to Formosa. Millet abused his official position to push through the new zoning ordinance. 

The Banners grew up in Wallace, and now own and operate a cafe that sells goods made from the recipes of their ancestors and presents the Afro-Creole history of the region through the lens of their own family oral histories. Now, they are fighting to save their community from a proposed grain terminal that would bring more grain, dust, and pollution to their neighborhood. The residents of Wallace, a small town 40 miles west of New Orleans, point to the illegality of the corruption and scandal that surrounded the rezoning in urging the court to nullify the ordinance and thus prohibit heavy industrial development.

On April 28, 2022, a district court judge refused to dismiss this case on procedural grounds and cleared the way to rule on its merits. Less than three weeks after this hearing, people who live next to the site received notices warning of “pre-construction activity” that would produce “hammering noise.” Greenfield did not notify the Descendants Project of its decision to begin operations on the land, which abuts two landmarked former plantations.  

On May 20, 2022, lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights and local counsel Bill Quigley filed a temporary restraining order under Louisiana's cemetery dedication law, an article in the state constitution that protects the right to “preserve, foster, and promote” one’s cultural and historic origins, and the First Amendment, which guarantees the free exercise of religion. A preliminary injuction hearing is set on June 3, 2022.