Six decades ago, hundreds of people in Palm Springs, California, came home to ashes. Their houses had burned, sometimes with their belongings inside – no time to evacuate or no place to go. It wasn’t the work of California’s notorious wildfires, but of the city itself, which razed the Black and Latino community known as Section 14 to make way for commercial development.
Now, survivors are organizing to demand justice. While Palm Springs – a desert resort town about 100 miles east of Los Angeles – issued a formal apology in September 2021, little has happened since. To help spur action, survivors filed a new amended reparation claim with the city at the end of November, which details alleged legal violations and offers a preliminary harm assessment. According to a damage estimate by Julianne Malveaux, an economist and dean of the College of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Los Angeles, families lost between $400m and $2bn in today’s dollars.
