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Areva Martin represents the victims of Section 14

HUNDREDS OF BLACK AND MEXICAN FAMILIES FILE RACIAL REPARATIONS CLAIM AGAINST CITY OF PALMS SPRINGS

While promoting an image of Hollywood luxury in the 1950s and 1960s, the City of Palm Springs’ racially restrictive covenants prohibited Black people from sharing that good life or living in white neighborhoods. Instead, Black and Mexican Americans could only build homes in the Section 14 area of the Agua Caliente tribe’s reservation. Then, over a 10-year span from the late 1950s through the 1960s, Palm Springs hatched a plan to demolish Section 14 for the purposes of developing it into more lucrative commercial enterprises. To gain possession of this prime downtown real estate, the city hired contractors to bulldoze the privately-owned houses, often with personal property and belongings inside, and then the city sent the Palm Springs Fire Department to burn the destruction.  Black and Mexican residents were often forced to flee Section 14 with only what they could carry.

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Areva Martin stands with survivors of section 14 in a prayer circle.

AREVA MARTIN, AN ADVOCATE FOR SECTION 14 SURVIVORS

“The city saw a chance to replace an unpretentious community of color, who had to renew their leases every few years, with glitzy hotels and shops that needed 99-year leases to pencil out. So it began the process of evicting, demolishing and burning. Survivors say confiscations often came with little notice, and that keepsakes and

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Areva Martin interviews Nikole Hannah-Jones The 1619 Project

Areva interviews, Nikole Hannah-Jones of THE 1619 PROJECT during the Leimart Park Village Book Fair

During the 15th Anniversary of the Leimart Park Village Book Fair, Areva sat down with Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning creator of The 1619 Project for an engaging discussion about the persistence of anti-Black racism and inequality in American life today. As a follow-up, the book THE 1619 PROJECT: A NEW ORIGIN STORY continues the conversation as a definitive account of how racism and Black resistance have shaped the nation.

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