California’s Novel Attempt at Land Reparations

More than a hundred years ago, on a stretch of California coast now reminiscent of “Baywatch,” a young Black couple named Charles and Willa Bruce bought the first of two adjacent plots of beachfront property next to some barren dunes in Manhattan Beach, in Los Angeles County. The price was twelve hundred and twenty-five dollars. “Beach culture” didn’t yet exist, and most Americans had no desire to live by the shore. The city was about an hour away from Los Angeles on surface roads, though a light-rail corridor had recently opened, to make the trip a little easier.

Only one other beach in L.A. County welcomed African-Americans at the time—Santa Monica had a segregated patch of sand called the Inkwell—and Black families drove for hours from around Southern California to sunbathe and swim at the Bruces’ property. The Bruces built an overnight lodge and eventually developed a thriving resort. “There was a restaurant on the bottom floor, a dance hall on the top floor. They had a bathhouse next door, then they had a novelty shop . . . and at the bathhouse they rented bathing suits,” Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, a descendant of the Bruces who is also a clan chief of the Pocasset Wampanoag Nation, told me. Standing at the top of a sloping grass park, on a recent weekday morning, he pointed out locations to me. “Down there on the lifeguard property,” he said, gesturing toward a county-lifeguard headquarters, built in 1967, “that’s where our resort was, right on the Strand.”

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