Today, Anthony, 37, is a security supervisor in Florida and teaches English online. Instead, his father took the kids and left California. 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.īernard’s marriage suffered, and he wanted Anthony’s father to become a lawyer so that he could keep fighting to right these wrongs, Anthony said. “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. His grandfather Bernard, born a few years after the condemnation, was obsessed with what happened and lived his life “extremely angry at the world.” George Peck, one of our community’s co-founders, made it possible for the beach area below this site to be developed as Bruce’s Beach, the only beach resort in Los Angeles County for all people,” the statement begins.Īnthony Bruce, many generations later, says this history continues to tear his family apart. In 1974, it was named after a sister city in Mexico, Parque Culiacan.īy 2006, after a summer of intense debate, the City Council voted 3-2 to rename the beach after the Bruce family - largely because of an appeal by Councilman Mitch Ward, the city’s first Black elected official.īut the commemorative sign, many say, reinforced the white way of seeing the world: “In 1912, Mr. City Park was born, and later renamed Beachfront, then Bayview Terrace Park. In the 1950s, city officials began to worry that family members might sue to regain their land unless it was used for the purpose for which it had been originally taken. “Generations of wealth building have been eliminated for so many folks of color in California history.”īruce’s Beach was razed and remained vacant for decades. “It is mind boggling to think about how many opportunities are missed when the government intercedes to prevent certain people from building wealth,” said Turnbull Sanders, who has worked for 20 years in land-use law. She noted how eminent domain was once also used to take property from interned Japanese Americans and to dispossess Latino families of their properties to build a public housing project that ultimately became Dodger Stadium. “The part that entrenches this whole idea of white privilege in the law and in our culture, that people don’t realize the full effect, is this idea of generational wealth,” said Effie Turnbull Sanders, the California Coastal Commission’s environmental justice commissioner. So they packed up and went inland, where they served as chefs for other business owners for the remainder of their lives. Most found other property in Manhattan Beach, but the city made it impossible for the Bruces to move their seaside business anywhere else in town. The other families, Black and white, received between $1,200 and $4,200 per lot. Another couple asked for $36,000.Īfter years of litigation, the Bruces received $14,500. The Bruces sought $120,000 in compensation - $70,000 for their two lots and $50,000 in damages. The Bruces and three other Black families sued, citing racial prejudice, according to Robert Brigham, a longtime resident and historian who, in 1956, sought to tell the real story of Bruce’s Beach in his master’s thesis at Fresno State College. The reason, they said, was an urgent need for a public park. When harassment failed to drive the Black beach-going community out of town, city officials condemned the neighborhood in 1924 and seized more than two dozen properties through eminent domain. In Huntington Beach, the Black-owned Pacific Beach Club mysteriously burned the day before it was scheduled to open. Another popular area in Santa Monica was referred to as the Inkwell. This hostility was not uncommon at the time. To reach the ocean, visitors had to walk an extra half mile around property owned by Peck, who had lined it with security and “No Trespassing” signs. Fake “10 minutes only” parking signs were posted to deter Black out-of-town folk. The Ku Klux Klan purportedly set fire to a mattress under the main deck and torched a Black-owned home nearby. They came to California, bought property, enjoyed the beach, made money,” said Alison Rose Jefferson, a historian and author of the book “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era.” “They did what every other Californian was doing during that time.”īut white neighbors resented Bruce’s growing popularity. A few more Black families bought and built their own cottages by the sea. Many referred to this area as Bruce’s Beach.
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