California

Susan D. Anderson talks about the forgotten history of California’s earliest Black residents.The California African American Museum in Los Angeles.Albert L. Ortega/Getty ImagesBlack residents make up a relatively small share of California’s population. But the state is so big that it’s still a significant number of people: Roughly one in 20 Black Americans lives in the state, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.Since February is Black History Month, I reached out to Susan D. Anderson, the history curator at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, to learn a bit more about Black history in the state, which stretches back to colonial times.“What I find is that every phase of Black history in California is misunderstood or not well-represented,” Anderson told me. “It doesn’t matter if it’s the 18th century or the 20th century — Black history in California just doesn’t get its due.”Here’s our conversation, lightly edited.Why do you think Black history in California has been overlooked?People assume that because California was a free state, there were no enslaved people and slaveholders didn’t bring enslaved people into the state. So there’s just assumptions that are wrong.But the other piece of it is that academic historians still haven’t really shifted their attention to the West as deeply or as broadly as they have paid attention to things like the 13 colonies or the South. If the West is an underdog in our historical understanding, then certainly Black history in the West, and in California, has been overlooked for a long time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The state has agreed to use at least $2 billion meant for pandemic recovery to help students hurt most by remote learning.A Los Angeles Unified School District student attended an online class in 2020.Jae C. Hong/Associated PressThe State of California settled a lawsuit last week that had been going on for more than three years, since the height of the debate around pandemic school closures. The case was notable nationally; there have been few others like it. And the settlement included an eye-popping number: $2 billion.Several families in Oakland and Los Angeles had sued the state, accusing it of failing in its constitutional obligation to provide an equal education to all children in the state, because lower-income, Black and Hispanic students tended to have less access to remote learning in the spring and fall of 2020 than other students did.It’s important to note that the state — meaning taxpayers — will not pay out any new money under the settlement. Instead, it will take money that was already set aside for pandemic recovery — no less than $2 billion of it — and will direct schools to use it to help students who need it most to catch up. There will be requirements to spend the money on interventions that have a proven track record. You can read more about the settlement here.Why does this matter?Because new national data released last week, in a study led by researchers at Stanford and Harvard, made it clear that students across the country are nowhere close to catching up on learning lost during the pandemic.That is true for students of all backgrounds, but especially for poor students. Schools in poor communities tended to stay closed longer than those in more affluent areas, and when they did, students lost more ground. Once schools reopened, students from richer families have tended to catch up more quickly than students from poorer families in the same districts, according to the new data.Yet there have been some surprising variations.In California, Compton Unified, near Los Angeles, and Delano Unified, north of Bakersfield, are examples of lower-income school districts that have recovered remarkably well, at least judging by standardized-test scores. You can read more about bright-spot districts, including Delano Unified, in an article I wrote with my colleagues Claire Cain Miller and Francesca Paris.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The most significant storm to hit California so far this year lashed the state on Sunday.It’s Monday. Yesterday was a weather day for the record books — and today could be one, too. Plus, the California State Senate has a new leader.Fallen trees in Pleasure Point near Santa Cruz on Sunday.Loren Elliott for The New York TimesIf you’re in California, you’ve probably been through some wild weather over the past 24 hours. The National Weather Service called Sunday “one of the most dramatic weather days in recent memory.”California’s biggest storm so far this year whipped the surf along the coast, sent tree branches skittering through streets and snapped power lines as it pummeled the state. In much of Northern California, the storm’s howling winds seemed to wreak more havoc than the driving rain did: In some areas, gusts reached 88 miles an hour, rivaling those of a Category 1 hurricane.As of 5 a.m. today, more than 560,000 homes and businesses in the state were without power, with the worst outages in the San Joaquin Valley, the Bay Area and the Central Coast. That was down from more 800,000 at 10 p.m. Sunday, as utility crews worked overnight to start getting the lights back on.Forecasters warn that the worst may still be ahead for California. An atmospheric river hovering over the Los Angeles region is expected to bring precipitation to already soaked lowlands and mountains well into this evening, and the rain may continue into tomorrow. A number of roads, especially in canyons around Los Angeles, were affected by mud and rockslides overnight.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

The orange and black insects were classified as endangered in 2022.Monarchs are in serious decline and were classified as endangered in 2022.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesEvery fall, monarch butterflies from west of the Rocky Mountains start arriving in California to wait out the winter.The orange and black insects are closely monitored, because the number of western monarchs that come to California each year has dropped precipitously since the 1980s, when it was common to see millions annually.This past winter, scientists and volunteers went to more than 250 overwintering sites in the state and counted around 233,000 butterflies, a 30 percent drop from the previous winter, according to a report released this week by the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.The decline was probably caused by the severe storms that hit California in the winter of 2022, which may have been too intense for the insects to survive, according to Isis Howard, who coordinates the count for the Xerces Society. That caused the breeding season last year to begin with fewer butterflies, reducing the population that would return in the fall.Monarchs were classified as endangered in 2022. A particularly steep downturn began in the winter of 2018, when about 30,000 monarch butterflies wintered in California, according to Emma Pelton, a monarch conservation biologist with the Xerces Society. Two years later, only 2,000 were counted across the state, and some of the groves that usually attract the most monarchs were devoid of them.“In 2020, the bottom fell out,” Pelton told me. The moment prompted many “existential conversations in the monarch world” about whether the species would ever recover, she said. But in a “somewhat miraculous” turnaround, she added, the monarch population bounced back to around 200,000 in 2021, a figure similar to this week’s count.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Atkins, the only person since the late 1800s to have held the top positions in both houses of the Legislature, is now running for governor.Toni Atkins, president pro tem of the California Senate, in November. She will step down from her role next week.Gregory Bull/Associated PressFor years, Toni Atkins has been one of the most powerful politicians in California, even though her name is unfamiliar to many people in the state.A state lawmaker for 14 years representing San Diego, Atkins has served as the speaker of the Assembly and, more recently, as president pro tem of the Senate — the first person in more than a century, and the only woman, to have held both of the Legislature’s top positions.During her tenure, she has quietly negotiated eight state budgets and helped enact some of California’s most impactful legislation: Medicaid expansions that extend health insurance to all eligible adults, regardless of immigration status. Laws that increase access to reproductive health care and protect providers after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Free meals for public school students. Tax credits for poor families.Atkins, a Democrat, is leaving the Senate after this year because of term limits, and she is ceding her leadership post next week. Senator Mike McGuire of Healdsburg is expected to succeed her.But her career in politics is hardly over. A few weeks ago, Atkins announced that she would run in 2026 to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom, who cannot seek a third term.She agreed to an exit interview, and we spoke by phone right around the time she was announcing her campaign for governor. I intended to focus on her political legacy, but we ended up talking mostly about her roots in Appalachia. Here’s our chat, lightly edited.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

The atmospheric rivers could lead to flooding, mudslides and road closures over the next week.The flooded backyard of a house in San Diego last week.Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesNo matter where you are in California, big storms are headed your way over the next several days. Forecasters are warning of back-to-back atmospheric rivers that could lead to flooding, mudslides and road closures between today and Tuesday.“We could very well receive February’s total normal precipitation within the month’s first five days,” forecasters from the National Weather Service’s office in San Diego wrote early Monday morning.California needs the rain to stave off drought. The state has gotten only about 81 percent of the total average rainfall expected by this time of year, and the snowpack is just 32 percent of average, according to state data. Water levels at reservoirs are still above average for this time of year because of the bounty of rain we received last winter, but they are not nearly as high as they were a year ago.The first storm reached the California coast last night, and it is expected to bring widespread rainfall and gusty winds to Northern California today before tapering off a bit and moving into Southern California tomorrow.It will pack a greater punch in the north than in the south, forecasters told me. Parts of Marin, Sonoma and Napa Counties are expected to get two to four inches of rain, and the Santa Cruz and Santa Lucia Mountains may get six inches, according to Nicole Sarment, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office. The North Coast is expected to get up to five inches of rain today and tomorrow.Flooding is expected in low-lying areas because the soil is already saturated from earlier storms, experts say. Heavy winds may knock down trees and power lines.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More