Their homes were destroyed with little notice. Decades later, a settlement attempts to make amends.

By Curtis Bunn

An image from Gloria Holland’s childhood remains clear in her mind: a man dressed only in his underwear, standing outside his front door pleading that his house in the Section 14 area of Palm Springs, California, not be demolished. The man ranted for several minutes until a bulldozer leveled the structure and he scampered to safety.

“I was 8 or 9 years old,” Holland, now 70, said from her home outside Atlanta. “It was the first time I saw a grown man cry. It was traumatizing.”

The man and Holland were among 195 Black and Latino families whose homes were bulldozed and burned to the ground with little-to-no notice in the late 1950s and early ’60s. The land, owned by Native Americans, had always been coveted by city officials, who wanted Palm Springs’ downtown area to grow with luxury hotels and shops in building up a city known as a celebrity playground about 115 miles east of Hollywood.

“On Friday, we were notified that we had to take anything we wanted out of the house by Monday — two days,” Holland said. “That was it. It was awful.”

In 2022, the Section 14 Survivors Group filed a complaint against the city, seeking restitution for the hundreds of homes lost and lives suddenly upended. Earlier this month, the Palm Springs City Council unanimously voted to approve a multilevel settlement offer to former residents and descendants of those who lived in the Black and Latino neighborhood.“It is the responsibility of the city of Palm Springs to compensate individuals for the destruction of personal property,” said council member Lisa Middleton during the hearing. “We broke something that was yours, and now we need to pay for it.”

As part of the settlement, 1,200 people will share $5.9 million in direct cash payments. The city also agreed to explore naming a community park in honor of the displaced, a public monument to the legacy of the former residents, and to establish a cultural healing center. The City Council also approved $21 million in housing and economic development programs to address past discrimination against its Black and Latino residents, which includes $10 million for a first-time homebuyer assistance program and $10 million to establish a community land trust.

The city will also fund a $1 million small business program designed for “empowering local business initiatives for marginalized communities.”

“It’s been a journey full of emotions, from sadness, anger, frustration to exhilaration,” said Areva Martin, the attorney who represented the Section 14 Survivors for two years in their pursuit for justice. “I knew that the conversation around reparations is a difficult one for a lot of people, particularly older Black people, many of whom have experienced so much racial trauma, but have been conditioned to live with it, not to complain about it, to repress it, and in some ways ignore it.”

To assure the City Council understood the impact of the displacement, Martin said she worked to convince her clients to “tell their stories in ways that they had not before, because many of these people had never said out loud what happened to them. They hadn’t told their children or their grandchildren. They definitely hadn’t talked about it in a public forum. But I knew that to heal and to move forward, we needed to acknowledge the harms of the past.”

The city will also fund a $1 million small business program designed for “empowering local business initiatives for marginalized communities.”

Doing so was difficult, Holland said. “Going through this situation brought up a lot of emotions and memories I had put away in the back of my mind,” she said. Digging back to the past seemed to traumatize her all over again.

“I’m sure a lot of my neighbors felt the same way,” she said, “because they had similar stories and I could look in their faces and see that they were seeing it all over again.”

Holland said her parents tried to shield the extreme nature of the displacement from her and to create normalcy.

“We were fortunate enough to be building a new home and my mother would take me there to see it under construction,” she said. “But I wanted my old home back. We had a community there. It was an idyllic place to live. We felt protected. No drugs. No crime. And they just took all that from us.”

Section 14, a square mile piece of land, was owned by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. Because of racial covenants in the 1940, it was among the few places Black and Latino residents could live in Palm Springs. In 1959, the federal government opened up leasing agreements for the Agua Caliente Band and other tribes for up to 99 years, which sparked the interest of commercial real estate developers. Residents worked in various professions to help build and maintain the Palm Springs infrastructure: carpenters, plumbers, construction workers, maids, chefs, gardeners and others in domestic jobs.

Despite that, the city, eyeing luxury tourism, gained control of the land from the tribe through a conservatorship and ordered the fire department to knock down and burn the homes.

In 1969, a California attorney general’s report described what happened at Section 14 as a “city-engineered holocaust.”Pearl Devers led the Section 14 Survivors group, starting in 2021, demanding that the city pay for the harms of destroying their community. She fought for her parents, who “suffered more than we did,” Devers said. “The adults lived through that madness. It tore our family apart.”

Her mother was a maid who worked at one time for legendary actor Lucille Ball. Her father built their home in Section 14. But when they were displaced, her father was rejected for a loan to buy another home.

Devers’ mother told her the pressures from redlining and racism led her father to alcohol. “Our family was crushed,” she said. “My dad never recovered from drinking.” He died at 68.

Devers said her brothers “missed having their father around,” without getting specific. She said she often wonders what her and family’s life would be like if they were never forced from their homes.So does Lawrence Williams, 77, who now lives in Columbia, Mississippi. He was “10 or 11” when he opened his front door to a man who operated a yellow bulldozer. Williams got his mother, Lucille McFarland, who was told they had the weekend to pack up before he returned on Monday morning to destroy their home.

“I still remember my mother sitting at that table crying,” he said. “My mother was a maid and made $1.35 an hour; she didn’t have money to just up and move. She didn’t have a car.”

Williams and his younger brother went to a nearby store and brought back some boxes. They helped their mother pack up what they could. Devers’ mom took Williams’ mother house hunting, but it was difficult. She finally landed a place about 15 miles north of Palm Springs in a man’s hunting trailer that had no bathroom or kitchen. They had to use the bathroom of the neighboring gas station. They endured those conditions for three months before finding a permanent place with more help from Devers’ mother.

“Traumatizing,” Williams said. “I feared that whole summer that I was going to end up having to go to school there, an all-white school. Talking about this is like an old wound that starts bleeding again.”

McFarland, Williams’ mother, is 101 and lives with him in Mississippi. When her son recently told her of the efforts to gain compensation for being displaced, she said, “No,” her son said. “It’s too traumatizing for her. She comes from Mississippi and has seen the Klan. Then that happened in California. She’s been traumatized her whole life.”The settlement has brought a sense of relief. Not the money, the survivors said, but the public acknowledgement of the harms committed.

“Coming out victorious means everything for our parents,” Holland said. “They kept us standing, thinking about them in this fight. I told Pearl, ‘I don’t think I can go another year with this.’ We were tired, traveling back and forth to California to fight this. It shouldn’t have taken this long to do the right thing.”

Martin, the attorney, said while they all rejoice in the victory, their work isn’t over. They want to make sure all the components of the agreement come to fruition. She calls this case the “journey of a lifetime.”

“This was led by folks in their twilight years,” she said. “I mean retired folks, many in wheelchairs, on canes, walkers, failing health, folks who have been marginalized, villainized, forgotten, erased, and for the first time, seeing that their humanity and their dignity was being acknowledged. That’s the victory.”