by Seth Freed Wessler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A development company abruptly halted plans for a sprawling grain export facility in Louisiana this week after a three-year campaign led by members of a Black community who said it would have ripped through rural neighborhoods, old plantation tracts and important historic sites. At the start of a meeting on Tuesday, Greenfield LLC announced that it was “ceasing all plans” to construct the $400 million, milelong development in the middle of the town of Wallace in St. John the Baptist Parish.

After a company spokesperson made the announcement in a small Wallace church, community members seated in the pews burst into jubilant cheers.

“It is an unbelievable victory, and it shows what happens when communities fight,” said Joy Banner, a Wallace resident who has led resistance to the facility as the co-founder, along with her sister Jo Banner, of a group called the Descendants Project. “The erasure of the Black communities didn’t work.”

The proposed Greenfield development, which would have been one of the country’s largest grain facilities, was the subject of a May 2022 ProPublica investigation that revealed how a whistleblower had issued a complaint to state authorities about the project — including evidence that consultants involved with it had buried her findings. An archaeological report she’d drafted on behalf of Greenfield — concluding that the development would harm Wallace and nearby historic sites including several plantations and an old cemetery — was gutted to exclude any mention of that harm.

The consulting firm that issued the report previously told ProPublica that it’s not uncommon for the firm to change drafts of reports after clients review them and that it “was not required by Greenfield or anyone else for that matter to make changes” the firm does not support. Greenfield did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about its consultants removing the findings from the report.

The report was part of a federal Army Corps of Engineers permitting process that requires developers to consider the impacts of their projects on communities and cultural and historic sites.

Several federal agencies raised........

© ProPublica