A legacy destroyed: Altadena's Black residents fear neighborhood's soul may never return
As embers wafted overhead against a reddening sky, Adonis and Denise Jones grabbed a few belongings and left their house last week in Altadena, California, figuring firefighters battling the Eaton Fire would do their thing and they'd be able to return in a couple of days.
Their home had been purchased in the 1960s by Denise's parents, part of a growing influx of African American home and business owners who found acceptance and affordability in the hillside suburb, making it among Los Angeles County's first Black middle class havens.
Numerous family members followed and like others passed their homes down through generations as California’s real estate market flourished.The Eaton Fire, among a series of large-scale wildfires that struck the county beginning early last week, has ripped a hole in the foundation they and others left behind. Rochele Jones, the couple’s 42-year-old daughter, said her parents and other family members collectively lost more than a dozen homes in Altadena.
“It’s gut-wrenching,” she said. “You had your family around and when you had an issue you could turn to your family for help. But this was the first time I’ve experienced where everybody lost everything on the same day.”
With much of the community of 43,000 largely destroyed, many question whether Altadena will be able to reclaim the diverse character and Black heritage that made it so unique. In the burned-out remains of bungalows, storefronts and landmarks that have perished, some fear Altadena may have lost its soul.
Efforts are underway to try to ensure that doesn’t happen. A pair of prominent African American law firms have partnered with California’s Prince Hall Masons to launch a GoFundMe page dedicated to Black residents displaced by the Eaton Fire to prioritize those most at risk and fill the financial gaps not met by federal assistance.
“This community has a large population of African Americans,” said James Bryant, a partner with The Cochran Firm in Los Angeles. “There’s a lot of elderly people who’ve owned their homes forever and live on fixed incomes. Their insurance policies are getting canceled. If we don’t raise the issue, they’re going to get overlooked.”
Overall, the Southern California fires have killed 25 in all and damaged or destroyed more than 12,000 structures along the Pacific Coast and inland near the San Gabriel Mountains.
Hundreds of displaced Black Altadena families have launched GoFundMe pages seeking financial aid, “but there’s also a lot of elderly people out there who don’t know how to do that,” Bryant said. “They’re our most vulnerable folks. We want to keep an Altadena that is close-knit and that African American community that was there.”
He said while the short-term goal is to help people get what they need to stay afloat, organizers will look to build long-term partnerships to help revitalize the area and protect those who want to stay from predatory developers.
“Some people have already been reached out to about selling their property, and that really hurts,” said community advocate Jasmyne Cannick. “People are waiting in the wings to buy. We want to make sure folks aren’t tricked into signing over their land.”
While some Cochran Firm employees lost homes in the blaze, so too have friends and family members of Bryant and his colleagues.
“There will be emotional scars,” Bryant said. “To be African American in the ‘50s and ‘60s and buy a home is something people would be really proud of. Then to pass it on for generations and see your family success continue to grow – when that gets wiped out, all these blocks of families, it’s more than ‘Well, just rebuild.’ It’s the loss of all these memories. It’s painful.”
Becoming a Black community stronghold
Altadena’s Black community had begun to sprout in the area as early as the 1920s and 1930s, when the Great Migration brought Black families looking to escape discrimination in the Jim Crow South.
“Altadena was one of the initial neighborhoods in Los Angeles County that allowed Black families,” Bryant said. “That’s why you saw so many generational families living in this area.”
Among its notable Black residents have been actor Sidney Poitier, who rented a home there while filming the 1963 movie “Lilies of the Field”; Lt. O. Oliver Goodall, a former Tuskegee Airman who was among dozens of Black military officers arrested in 1945 during a pioneering civil rights effort to integrate an all-white officers club in Indiana; and abolitionist Ellen Garrison Jackson Clark, who spent her final years in the area and is buried at Altadena’s Mountain View Cemetery along with science-fiction author Octavia Butler and political activist Eldridge Cleaver.
Until the 1960s, Altadena remained vastly white, a result of past racial covenants, according to nonprofit advocacy group Altadena Heritage.
The community began to transform with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Fair Housing Act of 1968. White families began to flee the area, driven by freeway construction, hillside smog and societal developments like the civil rights movement, school integration and the Watts Riots, the group said.
By 1980, a population that was 95% white had fallen to 49%. Meanwhile, as Black professionals and working-class families found affordable refuge in Altadena, their numbers rose in the same 20-year period from under 4% to 43%.
“Places like Altadena and certain areas of Compton and South Central Los Angeles was where Black families were forced to live,” Bryant said. “Altadena was a little further out, but it was affordable and allowed Black businesses to operate. Black families could raise families and have a community where they felt safe and could support each other.”
The suburban community they would build was passed down to their children, generational homes that in time would grow in value along with California’s real estate market. Today, the unincorporated area remains one of Southern California’s most diverse, with a Black population just over 20% and a remarkable home ownership rate of more than 75%.
“It was a happy place, with beautiful mountains,” said Carl Jones, 55, a 25-year veteran of the Pasadena parks department. “We worked hard to pay for it. It was a Black community. It wasn’t skid row, but we weren’t rich.”
The home in which Jones lived with his mother, jazz vocalist Cheryl Conley, was destroyed by the Eaton fire. Conley is staying with a friend in Los Angeles; Jones is currently at a local hotel but doesn’t know what he’ll do after that.
When Conley first moved to nearby Pasadena in the 1950s, Jones said, her parents sent her to private school in Altadena because Pasadena Catholic schools wouldn’t accept Black students at the time. Her father, Brit Conley, was a Navy vet who’d been at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked by Japan in 1941, pulling the U.S. into World War II.
In the late 1990s, Conley bought the home in which she and Jones lived for a fraction of what homes are going for today. But the real value, Jones said, wasn’t just in the house; it was in the sense of community.
“It was the neighbors,” he said. “We were so tight. We looked after each other.”
Adonis Jones (no relation) agreed.
“Everybody knew everybody,” the 66-year-old group home facilities manager said. “Most of us went to high school together or church. We shopped at the same markets.”
That sense of community and heritage, Carl Jones said, “is unrecoverable. You can only get that with time. If we go, it’s over. It won’t happen again.”
He’d seen news reports about the fires but hadn’t thought there was reason to worry. Fires happened in the hills, not in lower Altadena.
When Conley jostled him awake at 3 a.m., 90 minutes before his alarm was set to go off for work, and told him she and his sister were evacuating, he remained skeptical. But by the time he got up 90 minutes later, smoke was everywhere and he could see fire down the block.
“I never thought it would come down that far,” he said. “We’re not in the mountains.”
He grabbed a water hose and started spraying the roof and garage. A firefighter told him he needed to get out of the area immediately.
“I’m thinking, I’m going to save it,” he said. “Then the house across the street caught fire out of nowhere.”
With his phone battery nearly dead, he went into the garage to briefly charge up; by the time he emerged minutes later, the garage was aflame. Distressed, he called Conley and told her he wasn’t able to save the house.
He went inside, threw together a small bag of clothes and on the way out saved one last thing at his mother’s request – her father’s framed Navy photo from the wall.
'Altadena is not for sale'
The first identified victim of the Southern California fires was Victor Shaw, 66, whose family members told KTLA-TV he’d died with a garden hose in hand trying to fight the blaze. They’d tried to get him to leave along with the rest of the family after evacuation orders were given, but he’d refused.
Bryant, of the Cochran Law Firm, said he understood that sentiment after talking with area residents that day and having had to strongly persuade some of them to leave.
“Sometimes people say, you can rebuild, or be thankful you didn’t die, but these houses were people’s lives,” he said. “They had memories and the energy that families had, all these things people fought for generations to build.”
In recent years, many insurance companies have discontinued fire coverage in Altadena. So far, Carl Jones said he’d gotten no response from his insurance carrier, but he knows recovery can’t happen without help from outside.
“We’ve already gotten calls to sell,” he said. “But we’re going to stay. If I have to live in a tent on the property, we’re going to stay. It’s ours.”
Adonis Jones said daughter Rochele has been helping him through the tangle of insurance and federal assistance, putting together a GoFundMe page to help them with expenses.
While he and his wife plan to attend a town hall meeting being planned next week for the neighborhood’s Black residents, he fears many may not have the resources to stay in Altadena.
“I am worried,” Adonis Jones said. “Some of them are afraid to fight. They will see a lowball dollar and grab it and run. People will try to buy you out for pennies.”
This week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order aimed at protecting area firestorm victims from predatory land speculators making aggressive and unsolicited cash offers to purchase their property.
“Altadena is not for sale,” Rochele Jones said. “I know some people will be scared and take the money. But a lot of people who are struggling right now are used to the struggle, and they will hold on.”