Section 14 refers to an approximately one square mile (2.6 sq km) area of Indigenous land near downtown Palm Springs, nominally controlled by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. In the 1950s and 1960s, Palm Springs’ Black families and Mexican families were restricted to living on Section 14.
Section 14, 2013. Courtesy Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, GIS Group. All rights reserved.
Palm Springs, California, sits about 110 miles southeast of Los Angeles, in the Coachella Valley. Modern development in Palm Springs began in the 1920s as Hollywood’s elite built a getaway community of vacation homes. Notable residents included Frank Sinatra, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Elizabeth Taylor, and Cary Grant.
With development and affluent residential life booming, workers were needed to build, cook, clean, drive, garden, and do laundry. Black families fleeing the Jim Crow South were recruited and relied upon as a labor force, as were local Mexican families.
Palm Springs’ early growth relied heavily on Black and Mexican workers, even as housing policies restricted where they could live. Racially restrictive covenants excluded Black families and Mexican families from many of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods.
Section 14 provided the housing solution. Section 14 refers to an approximately one square mile (2.6 sq km) area of Indigenous land near downtown Palm Springs, nominally controlled by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. In the 1950s and 1960s, Palm Springs’ Black families and Mexican families were restricted to living on Section 14.
Notwithstanding the settlement’s discriminatory origin, families of Indigenous, Black, and Mexican people developed a vibrant and culturally rich community on Section 14, with neighborhoods, churches, stores, and other community assets.
Changes in Land Use Policy
In the early 1950s, federal policy restricted leases on Indigenous land to five years’ duration. This rule reflected an effort to force tribal members into small-scale farming and to compel cultural assimilation. The short lease term made investment and development difficult. The short lease terms made long-term investment economically impractical. As a result, families on Section 14 occupied mobile homes and built temporary housing structures of cinder block, aluminum siding, and plywood.
Recognizing that the short lease cap discouraged long-term investments needed for commercial growth, Congress changed the law in 1959 to permit lease terms of 99 years to attract development in Palm Springs.
With the change in law, Palm Springs’ city leaders viewed Section 14 primarily as a development opportunity, rather than as an existing residential community.
City-Sponsored Demolition and Burning
During the 1960s, Palm Springs orchestrated a series of “abatement” campaigns that dismantled the vibrant minority communities of Section 14. Under the guise of “slum clearance,” city inspectors tagged homes and structures that they considered unsafe or not built to code. The city gave residents as little as 72 hours to remove their personal belongings and vacate, then sent in bulldozers to demolish the structures. With thehomes demolished, the city ordered the fire department to burn the remains and clear them.
These tactics lasted from 1962 until 1969. They led to the destruction of at least 235 homes, as well as some churches and businesses. In 1968, California’s deputy attorney general Loren Miller Jr. issued a report from the state’s investigation into the house burnings on Section 14. The report characterized Palm Springs’ campaign as a “city-engineered holocaust.”
City officials framed the destruction as a necessary public health measure to remove “substandard” housing, but historical records indicate that redevelopment interests outweighed efforts to preserve existing housing. Today, the ground once inhabited by Black and Mexican residents of Section 14 boasts hotels, the Palm Springs convention center, a hot springs mineral bath resort, and million-dollar homes and condos.
Collecting, Preserving, and Amplifying Stories
Despite spending time in Palm Springs as a child, I had never heard of this dark chapter in the city’s history. In fact, I learned about Section 14 only because of a lawsuit that was settled in 2024. Despite the fact that more than a thousand residents were displaced and hundreds of homes destroyed, the city agreed to pay a settlement totaling approximately $6 million, distributed among victims and descendants.
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I became interested in Section 14 as part of a nonprofit initiative I launched after helping to secure the return of Bruce’s Beach, which marked the first time in U.S. history that the government returned land to a Black family after the land had been taken through racially motivated eminent domain.
After the Bruce’s Beach case, I heard from hundreds of families seeking legal help in trying to recover lost land. I realized that the law would not provide a remedy in most of these situations, but I felt compelled to make sure that these stories were not lost. I launched the Black Land Loss Narrative Archive Project as an effort to collect, preserve, and amplify stories of land loss by Black people. Once I knew about Section 14, I wanted to interview some of the victims so that their stories would be preserved.
What I got was a story that I never expected.
Family Connections
I knew that my father grew up in Palm Springs, but because he left my mother when I was five years old, I didn’t know anything about his life or family there. As I struggled to find Section 14 survivors to interview, I asked my father if he ever heard of Section 14 while he was growing up.
My father’s response shocked me. He told me that he was born on Section 14 and lived there with his grandmother until he was 8 years old.
I was in shock: I had spent almost a year trying to find voices from Section 14, only to discover that my family—my father—had lived there.
Determined to learn more, I dove into newspaper archives from the 1950s and 1960s, searching for Section 14 and also searching for my last name.
The first article I found was from the Desert Sun in 1954. The article described a resident-led community cleanup of Section 14. Two women were named as organizers: Mrs. Maggie Darling and Mrs. Florence A. Fatheree. Florence Alberta Fatheree is my great-grandmother, the woman who raised my father. Incredible, I thought. My family really did live on Section 14.
I kept searching the newspaper archives. The next article I came across, from 1962, completed my out-of-body experience. The title of the article was “Section 14 Burnings Probe Set.” The article reads:
The Palm Springs City Council last night ordered an administrative investigation and report on Section 14 burnings carried out under a Superior Court order last month.
The council took the action . . . in answer to a plea by 72-year-old Mrs. Florence Fatheree for city payment for her house and household goods.
Mrs. Fatheree, who waited through a 5 hour meeting to address the council, explained that she had been out of town when houses on 15 acres of Section 14 Indian land were destroyed by court order.
“I put all my savings in that little house,” the veteran Palm Springs resident told the council.
I found the city council minutes referred to in the article. In the minutes, the city council orders the city attorney to conduct an investigation and report back to Mrs. Fatheree. At the time, the city denied that it was involved in the house burnings.
I can’t remember ever being in such of state of disbelief. Not only did my family live on Section 14, but my great-grandmother lost her home in the fires. And not only did she lose her home, but she confronted the city and demanded justice.
My Calling
We talk about destiny and fate. About passions being in our blood or woven through our DNA. In my community, we talk about “the ancestors,” and the ways they call and guide us.
But I’m not sure I appreciated any of this thinking until I read my great-grandmother’s name in a newspaper, in a story describing how her home had been burned to the ground.
When I enrolled in law school, I didn’t know that my great-grandmother had been an organizer and advocate in her community. When I became a real estate attorney, I had no idea that my family’s roots lay in Section 14. And when I fought to recover Bruce’s Beach for the great-grandsons of Charles and Willa Bruce, I never could have imagined that my own great-grandmother—a woman I never met, who died before I was born, and whose name I had heard only two or three times in my life—lost her home when the city of Palm Springs ordered it demolished and burned to the ground.
Florence Alberta Fatheree was a leader. A voice. A force. A woman who fought for her community after the city set her home ablaze. She stood before the city council and demanded justice. She insisted that its members acknowledge her loss. Face her. Name her.
Florence Alberta Fatheree could have never imagined that, 60 years after she stood before the city council and demanded justice for the destruction of her home, her great-grandson—someone she never met, who was born after she died, and whose name she never heard—would fight to return stolen land to a Black family.
Then again, perhaps she imagined that precisely—and that’s why she did what she did.
More by George Fatheree in Urban Land:
