Guest contributor
Amidst all the negative news about the pandemic, mass shootings, political tribalism, attacks on women’s rights, climate threats, and much more, it was a welcome change to see headlines reporting that valuable beachfront property stolen from a Black family nearly a century ago was being restored to their descendants.
The backstory is simple and ugly, and its latest chapter raises uncomfortable questions about reparations and apologies for past wrongs rooted in racism.
Manhattan Beach is an affluent community south of Los Angeles. For 7,000 years it was home to the Tongva tribe. In the 1850s the US government seized most of their land, and bought the rest for seven cents an acre – not paying that until 90 years later, without interest.
In 1912, Willa Bruce, a Black woman, paid $1,225 (equivalent to about $35,000 today) for a lot on the Strand in Manhattan Beach, overlooking the ocean. She set up a successful lodge, café and dance hall catering to the area’s Black community, and bought an adjacent lot to expand the business. Her husband, Charles, continued to work as a railroad dining car chef.
A few other Black families soon bought land nearby and built cottages.
At the time, Los Angeles had a population of over 300,000. Many were migrants from the post-Reconstruction South who held deeply racist beliefs. Marriages between Black and white people were still illegal in California, and only a few decades earlier Blacks had been barred from making homestead claims or testifying in court against whites.
The Black newcomers were not welcomed by their Manhattan Beach neighbors, who were then – as they still are today – 99% white. They were threatened and harassed by residents and city officials. The Ku Klux Klan, revitalized by whites fearful of Black, Jewish, Eastern European and Mexican immigrants, set a fire under the main deck of the Bruce lodge and burned a Black-owned home nearby.
The Bruces refused to surrender and leave, so their enemies changed tactics. In 1924 the City of Manhattan Beach suddenly discovered that it needed more parks. It seized the Bruce family’s property through eminent domain, along with more than 20 nearby parcels owned by Black and white families, and razed the buildings.
The urgency to develop a seaside park then evaporated. The properties sat vacant until 1948, when the city, worried that the original owners might sue to recover their land if it was not used for a park, transferred the land to the state. A lovely park was built, and in 1995 the state turned it over to Los Angeles County.
In 2006, after some residents publicized the racist history of the park, the Manhattan Beach City Council renamed it Bruce’s Beach, declaring “friendship, goodwill and respect for all begins within our own boundaries and extends to the world community.”
But at that time, and again much more recently, the Council members stopped short of apologizing for what their predecessors had done. Instead they issued a “statement of acknowledgement and condemnation” for those actions.
On June 19 – Juneteenth – 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd, residents began a campaign, Justice for Bruce’s Beach, aimed at returning the land to the Bruce family. A county politician supported their cause, but discovered that state law blocked the return of land taken by eminent domain. In June of 2021 the state legislature passed a bill authorizing the restoration, and in September Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it.
Anthony Bruce, the great-great grandson of Willa and Charles, attended the bill signing and accepted the land on behalf of the family.
The three-acre property is estimated to be worth $75 million. (A single-family home nearby on a lot only a twentieth of an acre is now on the market for $12 million.) The family plans to lease Bruce’s Beach back to the county at a fair-market rent.
For the family, and even for the hesitantly “acknowledging” city of Manhattan Beach, it is a positive outcome aimed at reversing nearly a century of systemic and systematic racist abuse.
But is this a template for a tide of additional reparative unwindings of the huge number of thefts of property and opportunity throughout America’s history that were triggered by racism and carried out by private citizens and public officials?
Likely not.
After all, buried under the sand of Bruce’s Beach is the heritage – and possibly the bones – of hundreds of generations of indigenous Tongva residents. What reparations are they due?
More narrowly, the Bruce family has not been made whole. Willa and Charles were successful entrepreneurs in the hospitality industry. They started their business at about the same time, and size, as the Hilton and Marriott families. Their Black children and grandchildren might have built a similar enterprise, employing thousands.
City officials and hostile neighbors erased that possibility, and the example such a success might have provided to countless would-be business people of color.
About 20 miles north of Bruce’s Beach is Chavez Ravine, in Los Angeles. It was a thriving neighborhood of Mexican-American families until in 1950 the city declared it a slum. The city planned to bulldoze the homes and replace them with public housing, but newspapers and real estate developers decried this as socialism or communism. Instead, in 1955 the city offered the land to Walter O’Malley for a pittance so he could build a ballpark and bring the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles.
Some of the 1,100 families who lived in Chavez Ravine, mostly poor farm workers, were paid a modest amount for their homes. Others were simply ordered to leave. More than 60 years later, many are still bitter at how their community was treated. The city, and the Dodgers, have never apologized, much less offered compensation.
Across the country, Georgetown University has worked hard to acknowledge a stain on its history. Founded by Jesuits who fled England to gain religious liberty, the school was supported by vast tobacco plantations worked by enslaved Blacks. In 1838, financial problems that threatened to bankrupt the school led the priests to sell 272 enslaved workers to two Louisiana planters.
In an attempt at reparations, Georgetown is now offering preferential admission to the descendants of those who were literally “sold down the river.” The Jesuits have announced a $100 million fund to benefit the descendants, including funds for education and race reconciliation projects.
But this raises the difficult question of how to distribute reparations equitably – a subject that ties directly to this newsletter’s theme of income and wealth inequality.
There are thousands of descendants of the 272, many of whom face the same financial challenges that affect Black Americans much more harshly than their white peers.
One of them who probably does not is the actress S. Epatha Merkerson. The gifted star of the Law & Order TV series is a direct descendant of Isaac Hawkins, for whom the university has named a building because his happened to be the first name on an inventory of those who were sold.
Ms. Merkerson surely deserves a heartfelt apology for what her ancestor suffered. But would it be fair for her to receive an equal share of any possible financial payment? The likely large difference between her financial situation and that of most descendants of the 272 highlights the difficulty of translating regrets into restitution.
Alex Auerbach began his career as a business reporter with The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times and The Economist. He is now a communications consultant and editor/publisher of Pathogenews.com.
References:
Advocates push nationwide movement for land return to Blacks after victory in California — The Washington Post, Dec. 6, 2021
Bruce’s Beach can return to descendants of Black family in landmark move signed by Newsom — The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2021
Op-Ed: Bruce’s Beach will be returned to my family. I hope our fight will help others — Anthony Bruce, The Los Angeles Times, Sept. 30, 2021
America Has Tried Reparations Before. Here Is How It Went — Adeel Hassan and Jack Healy, The New York Times, June 19, 2019
Dodger Stadium’s Shameful Origin Story — Loren Kantor, Medium, Aug. 23, 2020
California created the nation’s first state reparations task force. Now comes the hard part. — Taryn Luna, The Los Angeles Times, Dec. 9, 2021
Finding your Roots, With Henry Louis Gates, Jr. — PBS, Feb. 5, 2019
The Case for Reparations — Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, June 2014
The Thorny History of Reparations in the United States — Erin Blakemore, History.com, Aug. 28, 2019
Doable Reparations for Native Americans — Todd Henderson and Jeremy Kidd, Newsweek, Oct. 14, 2021
California’s Racial History and Constitutional Rationales for Race-Conscious Decision Making in Higher Education — Richard Delgado and Jean Stefanic, University of Alabama Scholarly Commons, 1999
Terrific insight into our despicable history. Righting wrongs one case at a time is certainly better than sitting on our white privileged asses doing nothing.
I think this is a very thoughtful, well written treatment of the subject. We originators of "Only The Little People Pay" are thrilled to have Alexander Auerbach as our first guest contributor!