On Tuesday, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to return Bruce’s Beach to the black family who owned it before California unfairly seized it 98 years ago.
This is one of the most significant cases of land reparations in US history.
Marcus and Derrick, as well as Derrick’s sons Anthony and Michael, will now inherit the prime beachfront property worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Charles and Willa Bruce, the brother’s great grandparents, purchased the land in 1912 and built Bruce’s Beach, a resort for black families.
Despite racist pressure from neighbors, local government, and a Ku Klux Klan attack in 1920, the resort thrived.
However, the family was forced to leave in 1924 when the City of Manhattan Beach used eminent domain to seize the land under the guise of constructing a public park.
County Chair Holly Mitchell said in a statement following Tuesday’s vote that the Bruce family had been “robbed of their property and generational wealth due to unjust laws and practices rooted in systemic racism.”
The board learned that Anthony and his father will manage the property through an LLC that the family has formed.
According to the motion, the Bruce family will lease the land back to the county for two years. Rent will be $413,000 for the family.
The Bruce family will be free to do whatever they want with the land once the two-year lease expires.
The new motion also includes a provision that allows the country to repurchase the land from the Bruce family for $20 million.
The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2022 that the estimated value of the Bruce family’s land parcels had increased to $75 million.
The $20 million price tag was ‘confirmed by appraisals to be equivalent to or less than the fair market value,’ according to the motion.
Mitchell rejected the notion that the county was ‘giving’ the property to the family. She said: ‘We are returning property that was erroneously, and based on fear and hate, taken from them.’
The area of land in affluent Manhattan Beach on the outskirts of Los Angeles was a ‘refuge for Black families who came from across the state when racist laws wouldn’t allow for any other safe beach going options,’ Mitchell said in her statement.
While County Supervisor Janice Hahn said: ‘We can’t change the past and we will never be able to make up for the injustice that was done to Willa and Charles Bruce a century ago, but this is a start.’
Hahn said in her statement that Tuesday’s vote will give the Bruce family the chance ‘to start rebuilding the generational wealth that was denied to them.’
The plot currently serves as a grassy park and lifeguard training facility.
Average property prices in Manhattan Beach run to $2.9 million, with the area sitting south of Santa Monica Bay.
In September 2021, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 796 into law. This removed any restrictions in returning the law of the board of supervisors voted to do so.
Also that month the city of Manhattan Beach issued a statement acknowledging and condemning its city’s actions from the early 20th century – but the statement stopped short of a formal apology.
‘We offer this Acknowledgement and Condemnation as a foundational act for Manhattan Beach’s next one hundred years,’ a document approved by the council says.
‘And the actions we will take together, to the best of our abilities, in deeds and in words, to reject prejudice and hate and promote respect and inclusion.’
In signing Senate Bill 796, Newsom offered a formal apology to the Bruce family.
He said: ‘As governor of California, let me do what apparently Manhattan Beach is unwilling to do: I want to apologize to the Bruce family.’
The governor added: ‘What we’re doing here today can be done and replicated anywhere else. There’s an old adage: Once a mind is stretched, it never goes back to its original form.’
Anthony Bruce, a security supervisor who lives in Florida, said his family had been tormented by the seizure of their rightful property for generations.
Charles and Willa contested the eminent domain order and lost; the city paid them $14,500, and they left their beach and lost their business.
Instead of continuing to run a thriving resort on prime beachfront land, they ended up as chefs serving other business owners for the remainder of their lives.
Bruce’s grandfather Bernard, born a few years after his family had been run out of town, was obsessed with what happened and lived his life ‘extremely angry at the world,’ he said.
Bruce’s father was unable to bear living in California and moved away from the state.
‘I was five years old when my father told me that my great-great-grandparents’ business on a beautiful stretch of Manhattan Beach had been taken away from them decades earlier,’ wrote Bruce, in an op ed in The Los Angeles Times, published on Thursday.
‘It was a shocking and disturbing revelation for me as a young boy.’
‘When I was growing up, my father took us to Bruce’s beach,’ Anthony said in an April interview with BNC News.
‘It wasn’t called that back then, it was called another name and he said ‘all this land is yours. I want you to know that this is your inheritance and you’re going to have to fight for it. As it stands its not ours, but as it is its our legacy.”
The case was championed by Kavon Ward, an activist who learnt about the land’s history and founded Justice for Bruce’s Beach.
‘This country always likes to say: ‘You can make it. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” she said.
‘These people were doing that, and they were building community and spreading the wealth within the community and enhancing other black people, and it was all stripped away.’
Anthony Bruce said in the op ed: ‘I’ll never know if my family’s business would have grown to rival that of Hilton or Marriott, both of which were founded around the same time as Bruce’s Beach and grew from equally humble beginnings.
‘I have plans to one day soon return to my family’s land. When I go back to that stretch of Manhattan Beach, I won’t think only of the injustice done to my ancestors. I’ll also think of the progress our country has made.’
Willa and Charles Bruce purchased two parcels along the south shore of Santa Monica Bay in 1912 and built the first West Coast resort for black people at a time when segregation barred them from many beaches.
It had a lodge, a cafe, a dance hall, and dressing tents.
However, the land sat idle for years before being transferred to the state in 1948.
It was transferred to Los Angeles County for beach operations in 1995. It came with restrictions that limited the ability to sell or transfer the property and could only be lifted by a new state law.
The county’s lifeguard training headquarters building now stands there, along The Strand, a scenic beach walkway lined with luxury homes overlooking the beach.
According to the city website, the population of 35,000 in Manhattan Beach, an upscale Los Angeles seaside suburb, is more than 84% white and 0.8% black.
The city council formally condemned the efforts of their predecessors from the early twentieth century to displace the Bruces and several other Black families in 2021.
If the Bruce family decides to sell the property, the language of Senate Bill 796 exempts them from a documentary transfer tax and protects profits made from the land’s scale from taxation.
‘Plans for the property… [are] personal and between us, the attorneys, and the County of Los Angeles,’ said Duane Shepard, a cousin of the direct descendants of the property and a long-standing spokesman for the reacquisition of the beach.