​​Click here for Betty's latest court filing for details. HCBS Circuit Case Re-Refiling July 9.pdf   HCBS Circuit Case Exhibits Re-Filing July 9 2024.pdf  More​​​

"You would be wrong if you "leaped" to conclude that White racists, in Mississippi, deprived me of my right to (1) preserve the legacy of my parents, (2) provide affordable housing, and (3) build on the generational wealth they intended, for their heirs.  

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U.S. Congressman, ​Benny J. Thompson, while a member of the Hinds County Mississippi Board of Supervisors, signed the Board Minutes, presented to me, as the basis for this travesty. Over 10 years later, after the defamation and financial losses to me, the supervisor's latest attorney declined to defend these Minutes. Yet, they refuse to stop their interference with our business operations.

Congressman Thompson has since refused to meet with me or to affirm our historic designation of HSA. Shockingly, using the same Mississippi Black Codes and Jim Crow tactics of the Democratic practices of the KKK, elected Black Democratic officials acted to destroy my parents' legacy. These Black officials dismissed, discredited, and demonized our constitutional rights, with the risk of setting legal precedence to use against other Blacks nationwide. In 2009, they unlawfully alleged their authority to simply claim the HSA driveway and parking lot as a public road for the benefit of one Black adjoining property owner's need for more paved space. When I filed my lawsuit, in 2011, they illegally denied that I had any constitutional protections under eminent domain law, alleging that my claims were merely inferior, untimely, tort claims, governed only by tort law. ALL HISTORY MATTERS. Why? 20,000,000 African men and women were sold into the Transatlantic Slave trade by "Black African" rulers/officials, to increase and demonstrate their personal power and control. Similarly, the defendants, in my case, also acted unconstitutionally, under the color of law, to burden and brand my parents' legacy, property, and me as involuntarily servient [1], slaves."   Betty L. Smith    More about Black Codes           ​​​

1]Servient: A term applied to an estate or tenements [apartments] by which a servitude is due to another estate or tenement. See Servitude: The state of a person who is subjected, voluntarily or involuntarily, to another person as a servant. A charge or burden resting upon one estate for the benefit or advantage of another. Involuntary Servitude, which may be in the form of Slavery, peonage, or compulsory labor for debts, is prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Article I, Section 9, of the original Constitution had given Congress the power to restrict the slave trade by the year 1808, which it did, but slavery itself was not prohibited until the Thirteenth Amendment was enacted in 1865. The slave trade had begun in the American colonies in the seventeenth century and involved the forcible taking and transport of Africans and others to sell as slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment's prohibition against slavery encompasses situations where an individual is compelled by force, coercion, or imprisonment, and against his will, to labor for another, whether he is paid or not. The term servitude is also used in Property Law. In this context, servitude is a right of some benefit or beneficial use out of, in, or over the land of another.  Source as of October 8, 2024: https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Servitude