Bruce's Beach
Jun 24, 2022 10:27:02 #
dtucker300
Loc: Vista, CA
Bruce's Beach
From the Essential California newsletter. Friday, June 24, Kiera Feldman.
Today, Manhattan Beach is both very rich and very white. But a century ago, Black beachgoers enjoyed a thriving community by the sea, centered on a resort run by the Bruce family on land they purchased in 1912. The area came to be known as Bruce’s Beach.
When harassment by white neighbors and the Ku Klux Klan failed to drive the Black community out of town, city officials condemned the neighborhood in 1924 and seized more than two dozen properties through eminent domain. The ostensible reason? Building a public park. The city razed Bruce’s Beach, and the land remained vacant for decades.
In a plan made public for the first time, Los Angeles County officials have detailed how they would complete the unprecedented t***sfer of Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce, the Black couple who were run out of Manhattan Beach, my colleague Rosanna Xia reports.
The beachfront property, estimated to be worth $20 million, would be t***sferred to the Bruce family, according to the proposed plan released late Wednesday. The county would then rent the property from the Bruces for $413,000 a year and maintain a county lifeguard facility at the site. Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom authorized the t***sfer and codified into law that the property had been wrongfully taken.
“This land should have never been taken from the Bruce family over 90 years ago. Now, we are on the precipice of redemption and justice that is long overdue,” said Holly Mitchell, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. “Although we cannot change the past, we have a responsibility to learn from it and to do what is right today.”
State and city leaders across the nation have looked to Bruce’s Beach to see how the historic t***sfer would be made. Many say Bruce’s Beach could provide a model for those seeking to reckon with past injustices that violently dispossessed Indigenous people and blocked Black people, Latinos, Japanese Americans and many others from owning property and building wealth in this country, Xia reports.
The proposed agreement will be brought before the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for a v**e next Tuesday.
Anthony Bruce, the great-great-grandson of Charles and Willa Bruce, told Xia in 2020 that the history of Bruce’s Beach was painful for his family. His grandfather Bernard, born a few years after the condemnation, was obsessed with what happened and lived his life “extremely angry at the world.”
“How would you feel if your family owned the Waldorf and they took it away from you?” Bernard said in a 2007 interview with The Times. Growing up in South L.A., he said, when he told school friends that his family once owned a beach, they would laugh at him.
The t***sfer of the beachfront property “will allow my family to do what countless other American families have done since our country’s founding: inherit property and build family wealth over generations,” Anthony Bruce wrote in an op-ed last year. “I’ll never know whether my family’s business would have grown to rival that of Hilton or Marr**tt, both of which were founded around the same time as Bruce’s Beach and grew from equally humble beginnings.”
From the Essential California newsletter. Friday, June 24, Kiera Feldman.
Today, Manhattan Beach is both very rich and very white. But a century ago, Black beachgoers enjoyed a thriving community by the sea, centered on a resort run by the Bruce family on land they purchased in 1912. The area came to be known as Bruce’s Beach.
When harassment by white neighbors and the Ku Klux Klan failed to drive the Black community out of town, city officials condemned the neighborhood in 1924 and seized more than two dozen properties through eminent domain. The ostensible reason? Building a public park. The city razed Bruce’s Beach, and the land remained vacant for decades.
In a plan made public for the first time, Los Angeles County officials have detailed how they would complete the unprecedented t***sfer of Bruce’s Beach to the descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce, the Black couple who were run out of Manhattan Beach, my colleague Rosanna Xia reports.
The beachfront property, estimated to be worth $20 million, would be t***sferred to the Bruce family, according to the proposed plan released late Wednesday. The county would then rent the property from the Bruces for $413,000 a year and maintain a county lifeguard facility at the site. Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom authorized the t***sfer and codified into law that the property had been wrongfully taken.
“This land should have never been taken from the Bruce family over 90 years ago. Now, we are on the precipice of redemption and justice that is long overdue,” said Holly Mitchell, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. “Although we cannot change the past, we have a responsibility to learn from it and to do what is right today.”
State and city leaders across the nation have looked to Bruce’s Beach to see how the historic t***sfer would be made. Many say Bruce’s Beach could provide a model for those seeking to reckon with past injustices that violently dispossessed Indigenous people and blocked Black people, Latinos, Japanese Americans and many others from owning property and building wealth in this country, Xia reports.
The proposed agreement will be brought before the L.A. County Board of Supervisors for a v**e next Tuesday.
Anthony Bruce, the great-great-grandson of Charles and Willa Bruce, told Xia in 2020 that the history of Bruce’s Beach was painful for his family. His grandfather Bernard, born a few years after the condemnation, was obsessed with what happened and lived his life “extremely angry at the world.”
“How would you feel if your family owned the Waldorf and they took it away from you?” Bernard said in a 2007 interview with The Times. Growing up in South L.A., he said, when he told school friends that his family once owned a beach, they would laugh at him.
The t***sfer of the beachfront property “will allow my family to do what countless other American families have done since our country’s founding: inherit property and build family wealth over generations,” Anthony Bruce wrote in an op-ed last year. “I’ll never know whether my family’s business would have grown to rival that of Hilton or Marr**tt, both of which were founded around the same time as Bruce’s Beach and grew from equally humble beginnings.”
A visitor takes a picture of a plaque memorializing the park adjacent to Bruce’s Beach on Sept. 30, 2021.(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)
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