Bruce's Beach: A Century of Wrong and a Week of Reckoning

Stand here long enough and you will see the Pacific exactly as Willa Bruce saw it when she bought her first lot on this strand in nineteen twelve. The water does not change. Everything else has.

Willa and Charles Bruce built a beach resort here, on the Manhattan Beach Strand, at a time when the entire Southern California coast was effectively closed to Black Americans by custom, by intimidation, and in many places by law. Bruce's Lodge was one of the very few places between Santa Monica and San Diego where a Black family could legally come to the ocean, eat a meal at a table, and not be turned away. Black Angelenos came from across Los Angeles on the Pacific Electric Red Cars. The resort grew.

The response from the surrounding community was immediate and violent. The Ku Klux Klan visited the property. When that failed to drive the Bruces out, the city of Manhattan Beach tried other methods: code complaints, harassment, an attempt to rezone the block. When those failed, the city condemned the property through eminent domain in nineteen twenty-four and converted it to a public park. The compensation the Bruces received was below market value. They were financially ruined.

The park sat there for nearly a century. The history was not posted. The land was later leased to the state and eventually to Los Angeles County.

In July of twenty twenty-two, Los Angeles County returned the property to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce. Their attorney, George Featheree, said it was, to his knowledge, the first time an American government had formally returned land to a Black family after acknowledging the taking had been improper. The great-great-grandchildren of Willa and Charles Bruce then sold the land back to Los Angeles County for twenty million dollars.

The county has since installed historical markers. The land carries both what was done and what was undone. Those two things cannot be separated here, and they should not be.