California votes to return beach property seized from Black family as form of ‘reparations’

Nearly 100 years ago, the city of Manhattan Beach, California, seized a Black couple’s resort on a prime, beachfront piece of property, one of the few hospitality businesses in the area that catered to African-Americans during the era of Jim Crow segregation.

Now, state legislators have voted unanimously to return the parcel to the family’s descendants, in what one state senator calls a form of “reparations.”

State representatives voted on Thursday to return the property, known as Bruce’s Beach, to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, whose resort was taken by eminent domain in 1924 and later demolished. The bill is still waiting on a signature from Governor Gavin Newsom, but is expected to pass.

"I’m elated, walking on water right now," Duane Shepard, a Bruce family member, said on Thursday, according to the Southern California News Group. "This is one of the greatest things in American history right now."

The bill, known as SB 796, is the culmination of an effort that began last summer, as racial justice activists around the country joined Black Lives Matter protests.

“Time and time again different government bodies have used their power to deny wealth and opportunities to many communities of color,” the bill’s author, state senator Steven Bradford said in a statement. “SB 796 represents economic and historic justice and is a model of what reparations can truly look like.”

The Bruces purchased the property in 1912, and set up one of the area’s only resorts open to Black people at the time. At the time, numerous beaches, hotels, and other recreation venues were segregated or closed to African-Americans. The family built a resort, a lodge, a cafe, and a dance hall on the parcel.

"Bruce’s Beach became a place where Black families travelled from far and wide to be able to enjoy the simple pleasure of a day at the beach," Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn said in April, when the county and state legislators announced their intention to return the land.

But the area’s white population rebelled against the development. The Klu Klux Klan tried to burn the property down. White couples harassed Black patrons, and residents put fake signs on the beach saying parking wasn’t allowed. For those who defied them, some found the air let out of their tires.

“White neighbours resented the resort’s growing popularity and prosperity of its African American owners,” a recent report prepared by the city reads.

In 1924, the Manhattan Beach Board of Trustees took things one step further, seizing the resort, ostensibly to develop a park, which was never built.

Eventually, the land was transferred to the state in 1948, then to Los Angeles County in 1995. It now houses a training centre for lifeguards, and requires a change in state law to convert back into private property.

The controversy didn’t end there. Once the campaign to return the land heated up, an anonymous ad in a local paper complained that Bruce descendants were labelling Manhattan Beach a prejudiced place for an old injustice.

“We have been falsely accused of being a racist city!” the ad read.

The city also declined to offer a formal apology to the family earlier this year.

“We acknowledge and condemn what our city forefathers and some White residents did to Willa and Charles Bruce, four other Black families and a couple dozen White families 100 years ago,” Suzanne Hadley, the mayor of Manhattan Beach, told The New York Times. “But I do not agree that our current city must wear a scarlet R embroidered on our chest for the end of time.”

Last year, California embarked on a first-of-its-kind effort to study statewide reparations to Black people, as a way to compensate for the ongoing harms derived from slavery and systemic racism.