Families displaced from California neighborhood seek $2B

Families displaced from California neighborhood seek $2B


PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — 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, who now lives in Mississippi, 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 (24 kilometers) 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 in the 1960s from the neighborhood that many Black and Mexican American families called home. But the former residents say that is not enough.

Those former residents now say the city owes them more than $2.3 billion for the harm caused by their displacement. That would be nearly $1.2 million per family. The dollar amount was disclosed Sunday 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 that continued long after slavery ended.

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