A historical retelling of Bruce's Beach, a seaside resort near Los Angeles

In Wallace Thurman’s classic 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel, The Blacker the Berry, the protagonist Emma Lou arrives in Los Angeles to attend college at the University of Southern California. Having grown up in Idaho, she is eager to find a social world in which she will not be the only Black young woman. Among her delights is visiting Bruce’s Beach. She is thrilled: “The Pacific Ocean itself did not cause her heartbeat to quicken, nor did the roaring of its waves find an emotional echo within her. But on coming upon Bruce’s Beach for coloured people near Redondo …the Pacific Ocean became an intriguing something to contemplate.…”

Bruce’s Beach was a popular Black-owned resort in Manhattan Beach, near Los Angeles. Thurman, a Utah native, understood its significance for Black people on the West Coast. It was a sanctum, most comparable to Oak Bluffs, Cape May, and Sag Harbor on the East Coast, Idlewild in the Midwest, and Amelia Island in Florida—and its legacy is as complicated as it is glorious. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploiting Black labour and refusing the fullness of Black humanity were standard American practices. Black Angelenos, largely migrants from the South, were generally prevented from going to local beaches due to segregation and Jim Crow laws. When they did, they faced harassment, arrest, and assault. Black leisure, the kind afforded by Bruce’s Beach, was therefore not only a way to experience some relaxation, it was also a place for escape, for joy. That joy was a form of resistance.

But in its heyday, Bruce’s Beach was stolen. It was claimed in 1927 by the city of Manhattan Beach under the doctrine of eminent domain, with the Bruce family, who had owned and developed it, receiving compensation that amounted to only a fraction of what it was worth. This year, the property has been returned to the Bruce family and is now valued at an estimated $20 million. Los Angeles County, which acquired the land in 1995, will lease the land from the Bruces’ heirs, giving them a long-overdue opportunity to benefit from a wise and meaningful investment made by their ancestors.

Willa Bruce bought the first 33-by-105-foot parcel of land in 1912, shortly after moving to California in pursuit of the American dream. Her husband, Charles, worked as a chef for train dining cars on the route between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. It was a well-respected profession that accorded them middle-class status. As her husband travelled often for work, Willa managed the property. They were both strivers. He was born in Washington, D.C., and she in Missouri, both in the early 1860s. They had their son, Harvey, in New Mexico before arriving in California. Like countless other African Americans, they held great aspirations even as the promises of emancipation and full citizenship proved very thin.

The Bruces’ vision kept growing. In 1916, they constructed a two-story lodge with a dance hall and café, and in 1920 Willa purchased a neighbouring lot. Fifty bathing suits were available for rent. While the beach was advertised in Black newspapers, in both local publications like the California Eagle and national ones including The Liberator, it also occasionally received coverage in papers like the Los Angeles Times. But it was in the society pages of those Black newspapers where the great allure of the beach was most apparent. They covered the dinner dances, and birthday parties, with card-game tournaments, and retreats hosted at Bruce’s Beach.

Property ownership, a cornerstone of American aspiration and ascent, was always fragile at best for African Americans. And the seizure of Black-owned property is one of the greatest threads of racial inequality in the 20th century. Despite the modest space, Bruce’s Beach was the subject of numerous complaints from local white people. Tires were slashed. Fires were set. If visitors stepped just a few feet off the Bruces’ parcel of land, they could be arrested for trespassing and jailed. That space of joy was viewed as intolerable by the majority-white community. And in 1924, Manhattan Beach city officials initiated eminent-domain proceedings to take Bruce’s Beach and four other Black-owned properties, claiming that they intended to use the land to create a public park. It was one among many instances when Black-owned land was confiscated with minimal or no compensation by municipalities. 

While the Bruces requested $120,000 for both damages and the value of their lots, which they surrendered to the city in May 1927, they received only $14,500. Willa and Charles, financially devastated, worked as diner cooks for the rest of their lives.

In 1931, a Superior Court judge ruled that the segregation of municipal pools in the city of Los Angeles was illegal, but many beaches and pools in the county remained so for several decades. And it wasn’t until the 1950s that the city developed some of the seized land into a park. In the 2000s, the slow process of reparation began. First, there was a City Council vote in 2006, spearheaded by Councilman Mitch Ward, Manhattan Beach’s first Black elected official, to rename the park Bruce’s Beach. But ultimately, the goal had to be returning the property to the Bruce family. That end was finally achieved in July of this year.

Over the past century, the Bruce family was deprived of its land. And the loss was immense. It wasn’t just a matter of the value of the property; there were also numerous lost opportunities for development and investment. And no less significant is the loss of experiences: social gatherings, community building, and relationships that could have budded and blossomed. It was not just stolen land, it was stolen joy. 

Feature Credit: @brucesbeach/Instagram

This piece originally appeared in the November 2022 print edition of Harper's Bazaar US