Destruction of L.A. Fires Includes a Historic Black Community

As the rapidly-spreading Eaton wildfire in Los Angeles crept closer to the home he’d lived in for nearly six decades, Rodney Nickerson, 83, wasn’t going to panic. Despite the pleas of his worried daughter and anxious neighbors, he was staying put.  It apparently made sense for him to hold on: he bought the house in 1968, back when it wasn’t easy for Black people to own property in L.A., much less in a great neighborhood like Altadena. To Nickerson, a retired engineer who clocked in at Lockheed-Martin for almost half a century, there was no reason to panic. He would ride it out.  “He said, ‘I’ll be fine,’” his daughter, Kimko Nickerson, told a reporter for KCAL, a local TV news station. “He said, ‘I’ll be here when you come back and the house will be here.’”  Tragically, he miscalculated: when she returned to the house, Kimko Nickerson found her father’s body in the charred, smoldering ruins.  For the sixth day, firefighters continued to battle a series of deadly wildfires sweeping through portions of Los Angeles, killing at least 10 people, consuming thousands of homes, and displacing some 180,000 people. Although headlines about the fire’s human toll has centered on...