There’s a willow tree in Hayward, California, that Marian Johnson takes her mother to every year on her birthday. Johnson’s great-grandfather planted the tree decades ago, on his sprawling farm property in Russell City, an unincorporated part of Alameda county in the San Francisco Bay area that used to be predominantly Black and Latino.
Today, the tree is all that’s left of Johnson’s family’s land, which in the 1960s was seized, razed and turned into an industrial park. “It was a major loss for us,” said Johnson. “It was a lot of hurt and pain.”
Stories like Johnson’s – and countless other Black families who have been victims of racist and discriminatory policies – are rarely told as part of California’s history. But after a reparations taskforce undertook the unprecedented effort to consider redress for Black residents, stories like hers are finally being heard as a more complicated picture of California’s past comes to light.
It’s one that, despite California’s founding in 1850 as a free state, has been marked by “atrocities in nearly every sector” of society over the past 172 years, according to a recent taskforce report, including land confiscation and housing discrimination.
Although the form of any reparations has yet to be determined, and will be limited to those who can trace their ancestry to slavery, the work of the taskforce – which began a new round of public hearings on 23 September – has set off a wider reckoning over California’s racist past.
Here are the stories of three such families whose experiences show the impact of this harm – and the ripple effects it’s had for generations.
A ‘city-engineered holocaust’
Pearl Devers, 72, still remembers the childhood home her father, a carpenter, built for their family. It had a screened-in porch where she and her siblings would watch their black-and-white TV, and a closet her father added once she grew tired of sharing one with her brother.
Back in the 1950s, Palm Springs was growing as a popular resort destination, known for its pools, blue skies and vacation homes for Hollywood stars. Devers’ mother, a maid, cleaned houses for actors such as Lucille Ball. Devers recalled it as a time when the city was “starting to burst at the seams with celebrities”.
Yet there was a dark side to life in the California desert. Discriminatory housing policies prevented non-white residents from living in most parts of the city, except for a square mile of land adjacent to downtown known as Section 14. The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians owned the plot, and rented the land to families of color, many of whom worked in the resort town’s growing tourism industry.
The area became a close knit community for Black and Latino residents.
“We all knew each other, we looked out for each other,” said Devers, whose late husband also grew up in Section 14. “We played in the street together, we went to church together, we went to school together.”
But as Palm Springs emerged as a top tourist destination, city officials began to look at Section 14 as a problem, said Lawrence Culver, author of the book The Frontier of Leisure: Southern California and the Shaping of Modern America.
The city had long refused to give the area access to utilities such as water and sewage, despite residents’ requests, and officials said they were worried about the reputational damage of having a so-called “slum” next to an affluent tourist destination. Alleged concerns over poverty and health have long been used as cover for clearing communities of color, Culver said: “‘We’re doing this to make it public space, we’re doing it for public health’ – that’s the rationale for huge amounts of housing clearance.”
Another motivation, Culver said, was the discovery of a hot spring in Section 14 that led to tourist development, and city officials worried about competition.
The situation came to a head in the late 1950s and early ’60s when, after a series of complicated legal maneuvers involving the white, court-appointed guardians of Agua Caliente land who could influence how the land was used, the city began evicting residents and tearing the neighborhood down. Demolition crews systematically bulldozed and burned down houses, displacing about 1,000 residents.
Devers said many of her neighbors would go to work during the day, then come home at night to find their houses torn down. Her parents knew theirs would be next, so her mother grabbed whatever belongings she could and fled with Devers and her brother.
“The next time I went back to that place, it was gone,” said Devers, whose family received no compensation from the city for their loss of property.
After her house was destroyed, Devers went with her mother and brother to a friend’s house down the street, but soon had to move again – and again.
“We’d move from one place, then that place was going to get destroyed, so we’d move to another place, and we’d stay there for 30 days, then we’d move again,” she said.
A 1968 report by the California attorney general’s office called it a “city-engineered holocaust”, and found that the city kept no official records of those who were displaced, and couldn’t prove that residents had been served with proper eviction notices.
“The city of Palm Springs not only disregarded the residents of Section 14 as property-owners, taxpayers, and voters,” the report said. “Palm Springs ignored that the residents of Section 14 were human beings.”
Hotels, spas and casinos now occupy the land, which is still owned by the Agua Caliente tribe. Last year, the city issued a formal apology for its role in the destruction of Section 14 and forced evictions of its residents.
For Devers and her family, the loss of their home and community was incalculable.
She said the stress and trauma tore her family apart, leading to her parents’ separation and her father succumbing to alcoholism. Devers’ mother sent her to live temporarily with her older sister in Oakland, while she found a new home in the neighboring city of Indio.
“The family was destroyed,” said Devers, who is part of the newly formed group Palm Springs Section 14 Survivors. “We recouped nothing. We had to start from scratch.”
Palm Springs Section 14 Survivors filed a claim against Palm Springs earlier this year, in an effort to seek reparative justice for survivors and their descendants. Devers is also working with the group Where Is My Land, which was instrumental in the return of Bruce’s Beach in Los Angeles to the Black family that owned it before it was seized by eminent domain in the 1920s.
One of the biggest losses, she said, was that after losing everything and having to start over from scratch, her mother couldn’t afford to send her to college. Although Devers, who now lives in Los Angeles, built a career as a television producer at ABC and for the 2002 movie The Rosa Parks Story, she said it doesn’t take away from the injustice that was done to her and family – and all the other families of Section 14.
“It hurts to know that our families helped build the infrastructure of Palm Springs – as we did in America – with little to no pay, and we walked away with nothing.”
‘Sometimes the truth is painful’: Black pioneers of the Gold Rush
Dawn Basciano’s family has been in California longer than statehood. Her great-great-grandparents, Nancy and Peter Gooch, were enslaved in 1849 or 1850 – the exact date is unknown – when they were brought to Coloma, the small town on the American river made famous as the site where gold was first discovered. When California was admitted into the Union as a free state in 1850, they became free.
The Gooches were then paid for their work in construction and performing domestic chores for miners, and they saved enough money to buy land – and the freedom of their sons Pearly, Andrew and Grant Monroe, who joined them in Coloma. The Gooch-Monroe family would eventually own more than 400 acres of land, much of which they transformed into apple, pear and peach orchards; cattle ranches and homestead.
But Basciano doesn’t own any of that land today. Over several decades it was taken by or sold to the state to make way for the Marshall Gold Discovery state historic park, a 500 acre park dedicated to Coloma’s role in the Gold Rush. Eventually, there was nothing left.
“Being able to pass that land down generation to generation, that’s what creates generational wealth,” Basciano, 50, said. “The opportunity to do that, with what was once yours is now gone. It’s not because of a wrongdoing that we did. No, it’s something that we had no control over. That’s what’s more painful for me to digest.”
Black pioneers played an important role in the Gold Rush; they were enslaved and free, and hailed from every part of the US, as well as the West Indies, South America and France. But their contribution has often been overlooked. “California played host to the broadest representation of Afro-Americans in the western hemisphere,” wrote Rudolph M Lapp’s 1977 book, Blacks in Gold Rush California.
While some of the Monroe family’s land had been condemned and seized as early as the 1800s, most of the land was taken as the centennial of the Gold Rush approached. The state of California sought to expand its park in Coloma, including the original mill, known as Sutter’s Mill, where gold was found – which happened to be on Pearly Monroe’s property. When the state wouldn’t pay what Pearly thought the land was worth, it condemned the property, and after a lawsuit, bought the land for about $3,000 in 1942. After Pearly’s death in 1963, disputes over his will led the remaining land to be sold back to the state until none of the original property remained.
Basciano said that after the centennial, the land was reassessed and found to be worth millions of dollars.
The Gooch-Monroes weren’t the only Black family in Coloma whose land was seized.
Jonathan Burgess’s great-great-grandfather, Rufus Burgess, was also brought to Coloma as a slave upon the discovery of gold. Rufus worked in the mines and eventually earned enough to buy his freedom and that of his family. After the Gold Rush, Rufus farmed and acquired land. But, starting in the 19th century, that land was taken in piecemeal by the state through legal tricks such as changing the boundaries of the property, and refusing to acknowledge a person’s name change after slavery, Burgess said.
At the time there were limited avenues for recourse, and eventually, the remainder of the land was condemned and seized through eminent domain to make way for the expansion of the Marshall Gold Discovery state historic park.
“It’s traumatizing to know what happened,” Burgess, a 48-year-old battalion fire chief, said. “If they did this to my family, what happened to every other family?”
Basciano said she grew up hearing stories about her great-grandfather, Pearly, (whom she never met) and his orchards. He had moved to Sacramento but would drive to the orchards with Basciano’s cousins to pick fruit and cut down Christmas trees in winter.
Pearly wanted to turn the land into a park where people could learn about Black pioneer history, Basciano said. “He had so much that he set out and wanted to do,” she said. “And it just never came to be.”
Basciano, who lives in Sacramento and works for the state in policy and grant writing, testified last year for California’s reparations taskforce, and said that she supports some type of repair for all the Black California families whose land has been taken. In her case, she said that any land still owned by the state should be returned. (The taskforce voted in March to limit reparations to those like Basciano and Burgess whose ancestors were enslaved.)
But more than that, she wants Californians to know her family’s story. Although the state park makes some mention of the Gooch-Monroes, she said it’s not enough.
“I want Pearly’s story – and that of every early Black pioneer – to be told,” she said. “Sometimes the truth is painful, but I think it’s time to tell that – what the state really did, what happened to those families, why their land was taken, how it was taken.”
‘It wasn’t a peaceful removal’: the destruction of Russell City
Marian Johnson was too young to remember Russell City, but family and friends have filled in a vivid picture: sprawling properties with chickens, goats and cows; gardens full of tomatoes, okra and collard greens; extended family living just down the street; famous Blues musicians performing at the club.
Russell City was an unincorporated piece of land in Alameda county across the bay from San Francisco that, after the second world war, had become a haven for Black and Latino residents who faced housing discrimination throughout the Bay Area. It was perhaps best known for its rich tradition of Blues music.
Johnson’s first home was Russell City, but at the age of about one, she and her family – and all Russell City residents – were forced out and had their homes destroyed by the county.
“It’s absolutely devastating for me – for us,” she said.
Johnson said her family moved to Russell City, where they owned property, after being displaced elsewhere. One set of grandparents fled Louisiana and moved to San Francisco’s Fillmore district, once the heart of Black culture in the city, but were forced out during the urban renewal of the 1950s and ’60s. Another set fled Oklahoma for West Oakland – and was pushed out when Interstate 980 was built.
“Everywhere they went, they were forced off their land,” Johnson, 59, said. “It’s a host of atrocities that seemed to follow us.”
And it would happen again.
In the 1940s and ’50s, residents of Russell City began asking the city of Hayward for utilities, including water and sewer lines, which it didn’t have since it was an unincorporated community. But the city refused, said Diane Curry, executive director of the Hayward Area Historical Society. By the late 1950s, similar to what happened in Section 14, a grand jury declared Russell City blighted, opening the door for Alameda county to take it over.
Residents fought back, Curry said, including filing incorporation paperwork so that Russell City could have more autonomy. (The effort stalled the process for a year, but ultimately failed.) Johnson’s great-grandfather, Bernice Patterson, spoke at a 1963 board of supervisors meeting, asking how families would be compensated for their land. Others spoke out as well, challenging the characterization of Russell City as blighted.
Still, Alameda county started buying parcels of land and forcing out the 200 families that lived there. Homes were bulldozed or burned. Once the county owned all 200 acres of land, it was sold to a developer and annexed by the city of Hayward. By 1967, the old Russell City was completely gone, and utilities were brought in.
“It wasn’t a peaceful removal,” Johnson said. “It was a force-out.”
Now Russell City is an industrial park, and Johnson said there’s a parking lot where her family’s land once was. All that remains of her family’s home is a tree that her great-grandfather planted, which she said her mother still visits.
All of her grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who once lived near her in Russell City dispersed across California. “It just broke our family up,” she said. “The only times we would see each other was on holidays. But if we were all in Russell City they would be right around the corner. We’d be playing with each other, going to school together.”
Johnson, her siblings and her parents – who worked as a nurse and a social worker for the county – moved to Oakland, where she said housing discrimination limited where they were able to live. They ended up in an area that she said was less safe and over-policed. Losing property also meant missing out on building generational wealth.
Last year the city of Hayward formally apologized for its role in racial discrimination and the displacement of Russell City residents, and this year it formed the Russell City Restorative Justice Project, which will explore possible forms of restitution. But many say it’s not enough. Johnson said she grew up with her family telling her to reclaim their land, and she’s now working with the group Where Is My Land to build on the momentum of the return of Bruce’s Beach in hopes of getting her family’s property back too.
Johnson, a legal assistant who still lives in Oakland, said she sees Russell City imprinted on her life. She attends the annual reunions of former residents and maintains close friendships with many of them. And just like her grandparents and parents once did in Russell City, she maintains a back yard garden full of vegetables.
Still, she often wonders what life could have been like had she stayed.
“How much progress would we have made?” she said. “How much wealth would we have built? How much safer would we have been? It hurts my heart to think about.”
