Bruce’s Beach: The Seizure, the Return, and the $20M Sale

Bruce’s Beach was a Black-owned seaside resort in Manhattan Beach, California, founded by Willa and Charles Bruce in 1912, seized by the city through racially motivated eminent domain in the 1920s, and returned to the Bruce family’s descendants nearly a century later. In 2022, Los Angeles County transferred the deed back to the couple’s great-grandsons. Six months later, the family sold the property back to the county for $20 million, closing what is widely regarded as the first government return of unjustly taken land to a Black family in American history.¹

The Resort the Bruces Built

Willa Bruce bought a lot along the Strand in Manhattan Beach in 1912 after being turned away from other coastal communities. “Wherever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort we have been refused,” she said at the time. “But I own this land and I’m going to keep it.”² On June 17, 1912, she and her husband Charles opened a portable cottage that offered refreshments, rented bathing suits, and changing areas.

By the summer of 1916, the site had grown into a two-story building with a dance hall, restaurant, and changing rooms.² “Bruce’s Lodge,” as it was often called, became one of the few places in Southern California where Black families could go to the ocean. It drew hundreds and sometimes thousands of visitors, and it inspired other Black families to buy nearby property, forming a small summer community that included Major George and Ethel Prioleau, Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Sanders, and Milton and Anna Johnson.³

How Manhattan Beach Took the Land

Hostility began immediately. White residents put up “No Trespassing” signs, deputy constables harassed visitors, and tires were slashed and mattresses burned. The Ku Klux Klan threatened the resort and its patrons.⁴⁵ The city joined in, passing ordinances that barred changing clothes in vehicles or tents and imposing parking rules aimed at Black visitors.⁶

In November 1923, local real estate agent George H. Lindsey petitioned the Manhattan Beach Board of Trustees to condemn the area under the Park and Playground Act of 1909.⁴ In 1924, the city council voted to condemn the resort and surrounding land through eminent domain, claiming the property was needed for a public park. The condemnation covered roughly 30 lots, including those owned by the five Black families and 25 undeveloped white-owned parcels. The city has since acknowledged that the taking was “racially motivated and wrong.”³

The Bruces fought back. Together with Patterson, the Prioleaus, and the Johnsons, they filed a joint answer in 1925 seeking higher compensation and damages.⁷ They asked for $120,000 for their property and losses. When the court finalized the proceedings in 1929, they received $14,500 — roughly $225,000 in today’s dollars, and a fraction of the property’s actual worth even at the time.⁴

The family left Manhattan Beach in 1927. The city demolished the resort that same year, before the court had even settled the question of compensation.⁶

Decades of an Empty Promise

The land supposedly seized for a park sat empty. No park was built until 1956.⁶ Before that, the city leased the beachfront to Oscar Bassonette for one dollar a year, and Bassonette enforced segregation at the site.² The Los Angeles NAACP, led by Henry Claude Hudson, organized a “swim-in” protest on July 17, 1927. Participants, including Hudson, were arrested; he was charged with resisting an officer. On August 15, 1927, the city revoked Bassonette’s lease and took over the land as a public beach open to all.⁸

The property changed hands over the decades, moving from the city to the state of California in 1948 and to Los Angeles County in 1995.⁹ A county lifeguard administration building was built on the lots the Bruces had owned; the adjacent land became a city park. In 2006, Mitch Ward, Manhattan Beach’s first Black councilmember and mayor, led the effort to rename the park “Bruce’s Beach,” and it was formally dedicated on March 31, 2007.² Critics later said the original plaque’s language was “whitewashed” and failed to describe the city’s role in the displacement.¹⁰

How the Land Was Returned

The campaign to return the property gained real momentum around 2020. Activist Kavon Ward founded “Justice for Bruce’s Beach” to push for restitution, and the Bruce family engaged the legal nonprofit Public Counsel, which worked with pro bono attorneys from several major firms.⁵ Attorney George C. Fatheree III led the legal effort and designed a process that relied on negotiation rather than litigation, since no legal playbook for this kind of restitution existed.¹

The main legal obstacle was that state restrictions on the county-held property prevented a direct transfer to private citizens. State Senator Steven Bradford of Gardena introduced Senate Bill 796, an urgency measure authorizing Los Angeles County to transfer the parcels back to the Bruce descendants. The bill declared the original taking “racially motivated and done under false and unlawful pretenses” and included a state tax exemption so the family would not owe capital gains or income taxes on the transfer or any later sale.¹¹¹² SB 796 passed the legislature unanimously, and Governor Gavin Newsom signed it on September 30, 2021, at the site of the former resort.¹³

“As governor of California, let me do what apparently Manhattan Beach is unwilling to do: I want to apologize to the Bruce family,” Newsom said at the signing.¹¹

The county then verified the family’s lineage through birth certificates and other documentation.¹ On June 28, 2022, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 to return ownership to Marcus and Derrick Bruce, Charles and Willa’s great-grandsons, who held the property through a limited liability company. The deal included a two-year lease under which the county would keep operating its lifeguard facility on the site and pay the family $413,000 a year in rent plus all maintenance costs.¹⁴ The deed was recorded on July 20, 2022.⁶

The $20 Million Sale Back to the County

In January 2023, the family announced they would sell the property back to Los Angeles County. The sale closed on January 30, 2023, for $20 million.¹⁵ Fatheree said the decision was driven by the difficulty of getting development approvals from the city of Manhattan Beach and the California Coastal Commission. Bradford noted that zoning rules would have kept the heirs from using the property in an “economically beneficial manner.”¹⁶ LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn framed the sale as the family “finally rebuilding the generational wealth they were denied for nearly a century.”¹⁷

Some criticized the sale on social media, particularly given how long the family had fought to reclaim the land. Observers responded that the family had every right to sell, and that the $20 million was a concrete form of restitution for nearly a century of lost wealth.¹⁸

Manhattan Beach’s Apology and What’s Still Unresolved

The city’s own reckoning was slower and contested. In 2020, the city council formed a Bruce’s Beach Task Force. In April 2021, the council approved a “Statement of Acknowledgment, Condemnation, and Empathy” but voted 4-1 against including the word “apology.” Councilmember Joe Franklin said “today’s residents are not responsible for the actions of others 100 years ago,” and Mayor Suzanne Hadley raised concerns that an apology could expose the city to lawsuits.¹⁹

The council eventually went further. It adopted an official history report in June 2021 and, on April 4, 2023, passed a formal “Resolution of Apology” for the racially motivated condemnation. A new plaque was unveiled at the park on March 18, 2023.³

The other Black families whose lots were condemned in 1924 — the Prioleaus, Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Sanders, and the Johnsons — have received no restitution.³

Why the Case Matters

The return of Bruce’s Beach is regarded as the first time a U.S. government returned property to a Black family that had been unjustly taken. Fatheree, who built the legal process to be replicable, said the case is only one model among many that will be needed. “We will need many more than my one model to fix this wealth gap,” he said.¹ Bradford, who also serves on the California Reparations Task Force, called SB 796 “an example of what real reparations can look like.”¹³

The case inspired Kavon Ward and Ashanti Martin to co-found “Where Is My Land,” which helps Black families across the country pursue reclamation. By late 2021, the group was fielding dozens of requests.⁴ Property law scholar Thomas W. Mitchell has cautioned that the model is hard to scale. Statutes of limitations block most families from seeking legal recourse for property taken generations ago, and between 1949 and 1973 an estimated two-thirds of the one million Americans displaced by government urban-renewal and eminent-domain projects were Black.¹⁰ For nearly all of them, no legal remedy exists.

1
Boston College Law Magazine. A Reparations Milestone
2
LA County Library. Bruce’s Beach
3
City of Manhattan Beach. Bruce’s Beach Task Force
4
NPR. Black Americans Land History
5
Public Counsel. Bruce’s Beach Land Returned to Black Family After 98 Years
6
LA County CEO. Bruce’s Beach
7
LA County. Bruce’s Beach History Report
8
VPM. The Land of Milk and Honey
9
NBC Los Angeles. Governor Gavin Newsom Bruce’s Beach Bill
10
NRDC. Once Thriving Black-Owned Beach Returned to Its Rightful Owners
11
Los Angeles Times. Newsom Signs Law to Return Bruce’s Beach to Black Family
12
California Franchise Tax Board. SB 796 Legislative Analysis
13
Office of the Governor. Moving to Right Historical Wrong
14
NBC Los Angeles. LA County Bruce’s Beach Beachfront Property
15
Post News Group. Heirs of Bruce’s Beach Finalize Sale of Property Back to LA County
16
The Guardian. Bruce’s Beach Los Angeles County Reparations
17
LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn. Statement on Bruce Family’s Decision to Sell Bruce’s Beach
18
African American History Museum. Why the Bruce’s Beach $20 Million Sale Isn’t a Model for Reparations
19
Daily Breeze. Manhattan Beach Condemns Eminent Domain Against Bruce’s Beach