Families Displaced from California Neighborhood Seeking $2B

As a child, Lawrance W. McFarland lived on a small piece of land on a Native American reservation in Palm Springs he described as a “little world of its own,” surrounded by the parts of the city that were tourist magnets and depicted in movies.

The retiree recently recalled seeing houses of the diverse, tight-knit community being torn and burned down in the square-mile area known as Section 14.

“We thought they were just cleaning up some of the old houses,” he said.

But eventually his family was told to vacate their home, and McFarland, his mother and his younger brother hopped around from house to house before leaving the area altogether and moving to Cabazon, a small town about 15 miles west of Palm Springs.

Decades later, Palm Springs’ city council is reckoning with those actions, voting in 2021 to issue a formal apology to former residents for the city’s role in displacing them from the neighborhood that many Black and Mexican American families called home.

Those former residents now say the city owes them more than $2.3 billion for the harm caused. The dollar amount was disclosed at a meeting attended by experts such as Cheryl Grills, a member of the state’s reparations task force studying redress proposals for African Americans.

The effort in Palm Springs is part of a growing push by Black families to seek compensation and other forms of restitution from local and state governments for harms they’ve suffered due to generations of discriminatory policies.

California’s statewide reparations task force is evaluating how the state can atone for policies like eminent domain that allowed governments to seize property from Black homeowners and redlining that restricted what neighborhoods Black families could live in. Last year, Los Angeles County officials voted to the return land in Manhattan Beach to a Black family descended from property owners who had it seized by the city in the 1920s.

Palm Springs officials expect to work with a reparations consultant to decide whether and how to compensate the families displaced from the area. The council may take this up for a vote later this month. The city is home to about 45,000 people today and is largely known as a desert resort community.

The families are also exploring legal avenues for reparations. Areva Martin, a Los Angeles lawyer representing them, filed a tort claim with the city alleging officials hired contractors to bulldoze homes and sent the fire department to burn them.

Julianne Malveaux, an economist and dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, said the $2.3 billion figure accounts for the displacement of 2,000 families and the trauma caused to them.

Lisa Middleton, a city council member and former Palm Springs mayor, said it was important to acknowledge the city’s role in displacing Section 14 residents.

“Our history includes some wonderful moments for which we have every right to be proud,” she said at a meeting. “But it also includes some moments for which we have every reason to be remorseful, to learn from those mistakes and to make sure that we do not pass those mistakes onto another generation.”

The tort claim argues the tragedy was akin to the violence that decimated a vibrant community known as Black Wall Street more than a century ago in Tulsa, Oklahoma, leaving as many as 300 people dead. There were no reported deaths in connection with the displacement of families from Section 14.

Palmdale resident Pearl Devers lived in Section 14 with her family until she was 12 years old. She helped spearhead efforts in recent years to create a group to reflect on their time living there and determine next steps.

Her father, a carpenter, helped build their home and many others in Section 14, she said. She recalled how close residents in the neighborhood were, saying her neighbors acted as a “second set of parents” for her and her brother. She recalled smelling and seeing burning homes until one day her mother said their family had to pack their bags and leave.

“We just felt like we were running from being burned out,” she said.

Alvin Taylor, Devers’ brother, said it’s essential for city officials to listen to displaced residents and descendants before deciding on a course of action.

“An apology is not enough,” Taylor said.