Bruce's Beach: The Black Resort Manhattan Beach Stole — and a Century Later Returned

In 1912, Willa and Charles Bruce — a Black couple from Los Angeles — purchased two lots of oceanfront property in the small beach town of Manhattan Beach, about twenty miles south of the city. The price was $1,225. They were not the first Black residents in the area, but they were among the first to stake a permanent commercial claim on the Pacific Coast.

What they built was a resort: a lodge, a café, and eventually a dance hall and changing rooms — a place where Black families from Los Angeles could come to the beach, swim in the Pacific, eat, rest, and socialize. This was not a small thing. The beaches of Southern California were, in practice and often in explicit policy, whites-only spaces. Black Angelenos were turned away, harassed, or worse at most of the region's coastal areas. Bruce's Beach — as it quickly became known — was a rare exception: a place by the ocean where Black people were not just tolerated but welcomed.

Word spread rapidly. On summer weekends, Black families traveled from across Los Angeles County to Bruce's Beach. The resort became a gathering place — a space of leisure, dignity, and community that was otherwise almost entirely unavailable to Black Californians. Willa Bruce, who ran much of the day-to-day operation, became a central figure in the Black community of Southern California.

From the day the Bruces opened their resort, the white residents and city government of Manhattan Beach worked to drive them out. The campaign was sustained, organized, and escalating.

The Bruces stayed through all of it — the arson, the cross-burnings, the bureaucratic harassment, the KKK presence. They had purchased their land legally, built their business legitimately, and served a community that had nowhere else to go. They were the injured party in every single confrontation, and they were the ones who eventually lost.

In February 1924, the Manhattan Beach city council voted to condemn the Bruce property — along with several surrounding lots owned by other Black families — under the power of eminent domain. The stated purpose was the creation of a public park. California state law permitted municipalities to seize private property for public use provided they paid "just compensation."

The Bruces were paid $14,500 for their property. It was not a fair price for what they had built — twelve years of investment, a functioning business, a community institution — but it was the price the city set, and they had no practical recourse. Five other Black-owned lots in the same area were condemned simultaneously. The Black community in and around Manhattan Beach was effectively expelled from the beachfront.

The vacancy of the land for years after the condemnation is the clearest evidence of what the taking actually was. A genuine public works project would have broken ground promptly. Instead, the lot stood empty — the proof written into the geography that this had never been about a park. It had been about removing Black property owners from white-controlled beachfront.

What happened to the Bruces at Manhattan Beach was not an isolated incident. It was one instance of a pattern that operated across California and the entire American West in the early twentieth century: Black people who built property, businesses, or communities near desirable land — coastal, commercial, or urban — found themselves subjected to the same sequence. Harassment, legal pressure, and finally government-sanctioned taking.

The mechanisms varied but were interchangeable tools from the same toolbox:

In this context, Bruce's Beach was not exceptional — it was representative. What made it eventually exceptional was what came next, nearly a century later.

After the condemnation, the Bruce property passed through various government hands. Los Angeles County eventually developed it as a lifeguard training facility. The site became a public park — Bayview Terrace Park — and later was renamed Marineland Park. For decades, the park carried no marker acknowledging the history of what had stood there or how the land had been obtained.

The name "Bruce's Beach" was erased from maps and official memory. The California Eagle — the Black newspaper that had celebrated the resort — ceased publication in 1964. The community that had gathered at Bruce's Beach on summer weekends dispersed, aged, and eventually died without the history being recorded in any mainstream account of Manhattan Beach or Los Angeles.

In 1997, local historian Alison Rose Jefferson began researching what she suspected had been a Black beach community in the area. Her archival work — drawing on census records, city council minutes, deed records, and old newspaper archives — reconstructed the story of the Bruces and documented the deliberate nature of the condemnation. Her research was foundational to everything that followed.

In 2006, the park was formally renamed Bruce's Beach Park — a marker was installed acknowledging the history of the property. It was a recognition, but not a remedy. The land was still owned by Los Angeles County, and its value — oceanfront property in one of Southern California's most exclusive zip codes — had increased to an estimated $75 million.

In 2021, California state Assemblymember Chris Holden introduced AB 1604 — legislation specifically authorizing Los Angeles County to transfer the Bruce's Beach property to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce. California state law had previously prohibited the transfer of county-owned land without the state's approval; the bill created a legal pathway that had not existed before.

The bill passed the California legislature and was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in September 2021. Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn, whose district includes Manhattan Beach, had been the primary driver of the county-level effort and had worked with the Bruce family's descendants — particularly Anthony Bruce, a great-great-grandson of Willa and Charles — to document the lineage and prepare for the transfer.

The vote by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was unanimous. It was a political act — and a historic one. No other jurisdiction in the United States had successfully transferred government-owned land back to a Black family from whom it had been taken through eminent domain.

On June 28, 2022 — ninety-eight years after the city of Manhattan Beach voted to condemn the Bruce property — the deed to the land was formally transferred to the Bruce family descendants in a ceremony at the site. County Supervisor Janice Hahn handed the title to Anthony Bruce in front of the park that bears his family's name.

Anthony Bruce, speaking at the ceremony, said his great-great-grandparents "would have never thought in their wildest dreams that this day would come." The transfer was covered nationally and internationally — less as a local real estate transaction and more as a test case for what reparative land justice could look like.

Several months later, in September 2022, the Bruce family sold the property back to Los Angeles County for approximately $20 million — a negotiated price that allowed the county to retain the public park while compensating the family for the land's value. The transaction was structured to benefit the family financially while preserving the public use of the beachfront.

The name Willa Bruce deserves to be the name people remember from this story. She was a Black woman who in 1912 looked at a coastline she was legally barred from enjoying freely and decided to buy a piece of it, build something, and invite her community in. She was harassed, threatened, burned out, and dispossessed. She did not live to see 2022. But the land she purchased — and what it means that it came back — is her legacy.