A memorial service early this month for three Black victims of the Eaton fire was marked by simmering anger at Donald Trump’s choice not to visit Altadena, a suburb with a historic Black community disproportionately affected by the disaster.
It’s one of many decisions that have left residents of Altadena, a racially and economically diverse suburb of Los Angeles, worried about political and financial neglect in the aftermath of the fires.
The Eaton fire destroyed or damaged nearly half of the Black households in Altadena, as it razed more than 9,400 homes and businesses and left 17 people dead.
As California’s governor and other Democratic politicians have tried to ensure that Trump does not reduce or cut off federal emergency aid to Los Angeles wildfire victims, Black Americans see Altadena as particularly vulnerable to political neglect – and they’re still asking questions about whether Black neighborhoods in west Altadena received equal treatment during the historic blaze.
“We don’t want three-fifths’ justice,” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney, told mourners at the First African Methodist Episcopal church of Pasadena at the memorial service on 6 February. “We don’t want half-justice for those Black families who lost so much. We want whole justice. The same justice you will give the Palisades and Hollywood Hills, we want to make sure we get it for Altadena.”
At the memorial, Crump, the veteran civil rights activist Rev Al Sharpton and local Black ministers highlighted Trump’s choice to tour the wildfire devastation in the Pacific Palisades, a wealthy and majority white neighborhood, in mid-January, while not making a stop in Altadena, a more racially and economically diverse community.
Mourners in the pews expressed their frustration with Trump’s behavior, which came as his administration has continued to crack down on “diversity, equity and inclusion” efforts across the federal government.
“We were confused as to why he didn’t come to Altadena, one of the hard-hit affected areas,” Crump told the gathering. “We don’t know his reasons why he didn’t come to Altadena … ”
“You know why!” someone in the pews called out.
Sharpton criticized Trump for his suggestion that the US take over Gaza, while not having met with the victims of the wildfires in Altadena.
“You’re the president of the United States. You ain’t the president of Gaza!” Sharpton said. “You got a whole community burned down that needs to be investigated. What happened? What started it and why did it expand, and why did some folk get notice seven hours before other folks got notice? I’ve got stuff for you to do!”
Other local Black leaders pledged to fight for fair treatment for residents in every stage of the recovery process and to ensure that homes in Altadena were rebuilt with the latest in fire-proofing technology, just as they presumed homes in the wealthy Pacific Palisades would be.
“We will not rest until every man, every woman, every boy and girl is treated fairly by insurance companies, contractors, real estate agents, government agencies, and provided equal opportunity to make intelligent decisions to be able to continue to live here in this community,” Rev Larry Campbell, the minister of Pasadena’s First AME church, told the packed room.
Investigations in the wake of the fire have already raised questions about why those who lived in west Altadena, an area with many Black residents, received emergency evacuation orders after 3 am, hours later than in neighborhoods a few blocks to the east, resulting in chaotic late-night evacuations. All 17 people who died in the Eaton fire lived west of Lake Avenue in Altadena, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. Local officials subsequently ordered a formal outside review of how emergency alerts functioned during the fires.
Local residents had already been asking for weeks whether Altadena had received the same firefighting resources as the much wealthier neighborhoods of the Pacific Palisades, where a wildfire started and had been blazing out of control for nearly eight hours when the Eaton fire started more than 30 miles away on the opposite side of the city.
Both experts and local residents say they worry that Altadena, as a mixed-income community, is particularly at risk of post-disaster gentrification and displacement of current residents, issues that have had a stark impact on Maui in the wake of the deadly 2023 wildfire there.
Altadena’s proud history as a community with high levels of Black homeownership was shaped in part by decades of racist policies, from the “redlining” of west Altadena in the 1930s, to the displacement of thousands of residents in Pasadena when officials planned to build a freeway extension through a predominantly Black neighborhood. Other nearby towns, including South Pasadena and Glendale, were once “sundown towns”, where Black people were not allowed to own property or even be in the area after sunset.
“It’s very difficult to look away from the legacies of racial discrimination,” said Lorrie Frasure, a political science professor and one of the authors of a University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) report on how Altadena’s history contributed to the disproportionate destruction of Black homes in January’s fires.
More recently, years of gentrification and rising housing prices in Altadena have been accompanied by a steady reduction in the city’s proportion of Black residents, who once made up 43% of the city. Even without the shocks from the wildfire, if those trends continue, the number of Black residents in Altadena could drop close to zero, “erasing Altadena’s Black community”, the UCLA report warned.
While Altadena may face uncommon challenges in rebuilding, it is also a “close-knit” community with uncommon resources, said Melina Abdullah, a professor of Pan-African Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Its famous Black residents have included the Black Panther organizer Eldridge Cleaver; Sidney Poitier, the first Black actor to win an Academy award; and prescient science-fiction writer Octavia Butler.
“Altadena is also a very well-educated Black community, in formal as well as informal education. You have teachers and engineers and community organizers and firefighters,” Abdullah said. “Almost immediately, there was a consciousness around: ‘We don’t want to lose our community, we don’t want to be gentrified, bring [Alta]Dena back Black’ … Even in the midst of their crisis they’re already organizing to make sure they’re not gentrified.”
Other Black organizations have stepped up in support, including BET Media and the NAACP, which joined with other groups to launch a grant program for local residents, highlighting how the fire “stripped generations of Black families of not just their homes, but the sanctuaries and pillars of generational wealth they built”, the NAACP CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement.
The values of Altadena’s community have also been on display in the wake of the disaster. Local residents have organized multiple protests under the slogan “Altadena is not for sale” and integrated art-making and music into their demonstrations.
Emeka Chukwurah, whose family business and cultural center, Rhythms of the Village, burned to the ground, has been hosting a free boutique for fire survivors, and doing his best to share Altadena’s story with broader audiences, including at the Grammy awards.
While it has been good to see his city get broader recognition, Chukwurah said, he and other locals are worried that attention, and support, could be fleeting, even as they continue to face “a very harsh reality”.
“We haven’t even had a chance to grieve the loss of our store,” he said. “We’ve been doing our best to keep the spotlight, so we don’t become yesterday’s news.”
Though his home survived the fires, he said that his family has been staying elsewhere, worried about Altadena and Pasadena’s unsafe tap water and “toxic air” in the vicinity of the burn regions, and particularly their effect on children.
“This thing is not going to go away in a couple months. This is going to be a five-years-to-a-decade issue,” said Michael Williams, a Pasadena-based Black Lives Matter organizer, who knows at least 30 people who have homes to the fires. “We are going to need people to pay attention and be locked in.”
