The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors overwhelmingly decided on Tuesday to give Bruce’s Beach back to the black family that had owned it before California wrongfully took it 98 years ago.
One of the largest cases of land restitution in US history has been made with this move.
The beautiful beachfront property, valued hundreds of millions of dollars, will now pass to brothers Marcus and Derrick, together with Derrick’s sons Anthony and Michael.
Charles and Willa Bruce, the great-grandparents of the brother, purchased the property in 1912 and constructed Bruce’s Beach, a vacation destination for black families.
Despite racist pressure from the community, the local government, and a 1920 Ku Klux Klan attack, the resort thrived.
However, the family was forced to leave their home in 1924 after the City of Manhattan Beach exercised eminent domain to confiscate the property in order to construct a public park.
County Chair Holly Mitchell claimed that the Bruce family had been “robbed of their property and generational riches due to unjust laws and practices entrenched in systemic racism” in a statement following Tuesday’s decision.
The board was informed that Anthony and his father will care for the property through an LLC the family has set up.
The Bruce family will, in accordance with the motion, lease the land back to the county for a period of two years. Rent for the family will be $413,000. The Bruce family is free to use the land anyway they see fit once the two-year lease expires.
The amended motion also has a provision that enables the government to pay the Bruce family $20 million to repurchase the land.
The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2022 that the projected value of the Bruce family’s land holdings was now expected to be $75 million.
The $20 million price tag was “confirmed by appraisals to be similar to or less than the fair market value,” according to the motion.
Mitchell disagreed with the idea that the county was ‘giving’ the family the property. We are returning property that was wrongfully taken from them based on fear and hate, the woman declared.
According to Mitchell’s statement, the plot of property in luxurious Manhattan Beach, which is located on the outskirts of Los Angeles, served as a “refuge for Black families who traveled from throughout the state when racist laws wouldn’t allow for any other safe beach going options.”
As for the injustice done to Willa and Charles Bruce a century ago, County Supervisor Janice Hahn said: “We can’t alter the past and we won’t ever be able to make up for it, but this is a start.”
The vote on Tuesday, according to Hahn, will allow the Bruce family to “start rebuilding the generational wealth that was denied to them.”
The area is currently used as a training ground for lifeguards and a grassy park.
Manhattan Beach, which is located south of Santa Monica Bay, has average home prices of $2.9 million.
Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, approved Senate Bill 796 in September 2021. This eliminated any limitations on applying the law as the board of supervisors had decided to do.
The city of Manhattan Beach released a statement that same month that acknowledged and denounced its acts from the early 20th century, but stopped short of issuing a formal apology.
According to a paper the council authorized, “We give this Acknowledgement and Condemnation as a foundational act for Manhattan Beach’s future one hundred years.”
And the collective steps we will take, to the best of our abilities, in words and acts, to combat prejudice and hatred and advance inclusion and respect.
Senate Bill 796 was signed by Newsom as an official apology to the Bruce family.
“Let me do what evidently Manhattan Beach is hesitant to do,” he continued, “as governor of California: I want to apologize to the Bruce family.”
“What we’re doing here today can be done and copied anywhere else,” the governor continued. Once a mind is stretched, it never returns to its former form, according to an old proverb.
Florida-based security supervisor Anthony Bruce claimed that his family had endured generations of suffering due to the confiscation of their legitimate property.
The city paid Charles and Willa $14,500 after they unsuccessfully challenged the eminent domain decree; they had to leave their beach and shut down their company.
They ended up working as chefs for other business owners for the rest of their lives rather than continuing to operate a successful resort on prime beachfront property.
Bernard, Bruce’s grandfather, was tremendously unhappy with the world and preoccupied with what had happened. He was born a few years after his family had been driven out of town.
Bruce’s father left California because he could no longer stand living there.
Bruce wrote in a Thursday op-ed for The Los Angeles Times, “I was five years old when my father told me that my great-great-grandparents’ company on a lovely stretch of Manhattan Beach had been taken away from them decades earlier.”
“As a young lad, it was a stunning and disturbing revelation for me.”
Anthony stated in an April interview with BNC News, “My father used to take us to Bruce’s beach while I was growing up.”
He said, “All this land is yours,” even though it wasn’t then known by that name. I want you to understand that you will have to battle for this inheritance because it is yours. Even though it isn’t actually ours, it is our heritage as it is.
Kavon Ward, an activist who created Justice for Bruce’s Beach after learning about the history of the area, led the fight for the lawsuit.
This nation frequently uses the adage “You can make it.” Just get yourself back on your feet, she advised.
“These folks were doing that, they were enriching other Black people, they were developing community, they were spreading money throughout the community, and it was all torn away.”
I’ll never know if my family’s business would have developed to rival that of Hilton or Marriott, both of which were established around the same time as Bruce’s Beach and developed from very modest beginnings, said Anthony Bruce in the opinion piece.
“I have plans to visit my family’s farm again shortly. I won’t only reflect on the injustice done to my ancestors when I return to that section of Manhattan Beach. I’ll also reflect on the advancements made by our nation.
When segregation forbade black people from using numerous beaches, Willa and Charles Bruce bought two plots of land on the south bank of Santa Monica Bay and constructed the first black-only resort on the West Coast.
A lodge, diner, dance floor, and dressing tents were present.
But after years of inactivity, the site was given to the state in 1948.
For beach operations, it was given to Los Angeles County in 1995. It came with limitations on how to sell or transfer the land, and those limits could only be removed by passing a new state law.
The Strand, a picturesque seaside path flanked with opulent residences overlooking the ocean, is where the county’s lifeguard training center is currently located.
According to the city website, Manhattan Beach, a posh beachfront enclave of Los Angeles, has a population of 35,000 people who are more than 84% white and 0.8% black.
The municipal council’s formal condemnation of the Bruces’ and many other Black families’ eviction attempts by their early 20th century forebears came in 2021.
The language of Senate Bill 796 would shelter earnings from the land’s sale from taxation and free the Bruce family from a documentary transfer tax if they decided to sell the property.
Duane Shepard, a longtime advocate for the repurchase of the beach and a relative of the land’s direct ancestors, stated that “plans for the property… [are] personal and between us, the attorneys, and the County of Los Angeles.”