‘This is what reparations look like’: Los Angeles County chair
(Bloomberg) — Los Angeles County is buying a prime Southern California beachfront property that had been forcibly taken from a Black couple a century ago and recently given back to its heirs.
In a ceremony in July, the county returned the deed of Bruce’s Beach, located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the city of Los Angeles, to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, who were stripped of the land by Manhattan Beach city officials in 1924. Those family members have now decided to sell the property back to the county for almost $20 million.
“This fight has always been about what is best for the Bruce family, and they feel what is best for them is selling this property back to the county for nearly $20 million and finally rebuilding the generational wealth they were denied for nearly a century,” said Janice Hahn, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, in a statement on Tuesday.
A spokesperson for Hahn told Bloomberg News that the Bruce family did not intend to release a statement about the sale.
Bruce’s Beach, which comprised two lots of land with beachfront views in the Southern California enclave of Manhattan Beach, was purchased by the Bruces between 1912 and 1920, where they built a resort welcoming Black beachgoers. The property and several others owned by at least six other Black landowners were seized by Manhattan Beach authorities in the 1920s, after White residents made racist and hostile complaints.
Following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the Manhattan Beach City Council assembled a task force which ultimately acknowledged the harm inflicted on those residents, and recommended that the county return the land to the Bruce family.
The land was leased back to the Bruce family’s descendants, with an option to sell the land back to the county for its market price.
At the time of the agreement, Anthony Bruce said his great-great-grandparents’s loss “destroyed them financially. It destroyed their chance at the American Dream. I wish they could see what has happened today.”
The median price for a house in Manhattan Beach was $2.6 million in November 2022, according to Redfin data. Fewer than 1% of residents in the area are Black, data from the US Census Bureau show.
“This is what reparations look like and it is a model that I hope governments across the country will follow,” said Hahn in Tuesday’s statement.
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