On November 9, 2021, on behalf of The Descendants Project, an organization founded to advocate for descendants of people once enslaved in Louisiana’s river parishes, the Center for Constitutional Rights 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 corrupt rezoning 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.