Bruce’s Beach Was Hailed as a Reparations Model. Then the Family Sold It.

MANHATTAN BEACH, Calif. — On a bright day last summer, Anthony Bruce stood on a patch of grassy land perched on the Pacific Ocean. As deep blue waves gently dissolved onto the shoreline behind him, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder handed Mr. Bruce a document transferring this piece of oceanfront property to his family — 95 years after they lost it.

Anthony Bruce raised the deed above his head in celebration. “It was shocking,” he said.

The moment was the culmination of a nearly hundred-year battle for restitution. Anthony’s great-great-grandparents, Charles and Willa Bruce, were Black entrepreneurs who purchased the land and built a thriving business there, until the government seized it.

The return of the land, known as Bruce’s Beach, was held up as a first of its kind in reparations from a U.S. government entity, and a model for how attempts might work to compensate Black Americans for centuries of economic oppression and enslavement.

The stars had to align perfectly: There were thousands of lawyers’ hours. The crafting of legislation. The political will spurred by racial justice activists energized by the momentum for social justice after the murder of George Floyd.

Then, in January, the heirs to Bruce’s Beach announced that they were selling the land back to Los Angeles County for $20 million.

The Bruces’ decision to sell has stirred fresh debate about the goals and methods of reparations, just as those efforts have been gaining traction at universities and local governments.

Activists who had helped the Bruces secure the land, and other observers, were disappointed that the family decided not to hold onto it and try to reclaim the vision of their ancestors.

“Say it ain’t so,” Tavis Smiley said on his radio show. “It was the quintessential example, to my mind at least, of how reparations should work. And many of us were heartened by this rare public example of government doing right by Black folk.”

The Bruce family themselves have grappled with whether the return of the land was truly reparations.

“You know, I don’t believe they would say yes, this is reparations for our family, because this is something that we already had,” Anthony Bruce said of his great-great grandparents. “This was something that was stolen from us.”

Bruce’s Beach was now part of a national narrative about what is owed to Black people in America for past injustice — and what Black people owe to one another in the larger quest for reparations.

But it was also one family’s real estate transaction.

A Rare California Dream

In 1912, Willa Bruce purchased Lot 8 in Block 5 for $1,225 in Manhattan Beach, a coastal town in the center of a pristine curved shoreline, with the Santa Monica mountains rising in the distance. Eight years later, she purchased another lot.

Willa and Charles Bruce built a small resort, one of the few oceanside establishments where Black people could eat, dance and swim. The early version of the resort consisted of a small portable cottage with a food stand out front.

As the Bruces’ business thrived and other African American families began purchasing property nearby, some of their white neighbors started complaining about a “Negro invasion,” according to Alison Rose Jefferson, a historian who wrote about the Bruces and other Black families in her book, “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era.”

Fires and cross burnings on Black-owned properties in Manhattan Beach were investigated, according to a report commissioned by the city of Manhattan Beach in 2021. A local newspaper article from 1928, cited in the report, said that “dynamite, bullets and the secret torch are all alleged to have been employed by residents in order to induce the [N]egroes to travel. Certain citizens objected to a colored settlement.”

In 1924, the city of Manhattan Beach decided to use eminent domain powers to condemn and seize the Bruce property — and those of other Black families. Officials claimed that the city needed the land for a park, but the Black landowners said the seizure was motivated by racial animus.

Willa and Charles surrendered their property in 1927 and spent years fighting the condemnation in court before settling for a $14,500 sale price, or the equivalent of around $254,000 in today’s dollars.

One local paper, which referred to Black landowners as a “menace,” praised the seizure, writing at the time that Black residents “depreciated property values to a considerable extent and many sales were lost on this account.”

Charles Bruce died in 1931. Willa Bruce died three years later. Anthony Bruce believes she ended up working as a dishwasher.

Manhattan Beach developed into one of the wealthiest, and whitest, coastal communities in the state. Homes that line the oceanfront strand routinely sell for millions, including several listed well above $10 million, prompting some to say that the Bruces should have received a higher price.

Some members of the Bruce family left California, eventually settling in Nevada and Florida, but the family never forgot about Bruce’s Beach. Subsequent generations of Bruces would pass down the story like a tragic inheritance.

“It was kind of like the skeleton-in-the-closet kind of thing for our family,” Anthony Bruce said. “Because it was such a traumatic experience for the entire family.”

Anthony Bruce said there was a measure of shame attached to the very question people asked him: “Did you have your land stolen from you?” Some Bruce family members thought it best to move on and not talk about it. Others in the family said, “we need to fight. we need to go over there and do everything we can to get it back,” Anthony Bruce said.

For Willa and Charles’s grandson, Bernard Bruce, the land became an obsession that “destroyed his relationship with his family,” said Anthony Bruce, Bernard’s grandson.

Bernard Bruce died in 2021. He never saw the return of the Bruce land.

‘A Long and Arduous Journey’

After the Bruce name was back on the deed, and after a celebration in Los Angeles, the Bruce descendants returned to their homes. Anthony Bruce, 40, went back to Tampa, where he had been working overnight in security. Derrick Bruce, his father, returned to Las Vegas, where he works as a tour guide.

But the saga of the Bruce land was not over.

Though the property was once again legally theirs, they could not develop it under existing zoning restrictions, and it might take years of litigation to overcome that obstacle. Family members initially agreed to lease the land to Los Angeles County for $413,000 a year while they decided what to do.

“We wanted to keep the property,” said Derrick Bruce, who is 65. But he added, “We thought it would be a long and arduous journey.” He said he could not imagine learning to become a developer and a contractor at this stage of his life.

“We had to be able to come to a decision that was acceptable to everyone in the family,” he said. “And so it just didn’t seem practical that we could keep the land and not have to drastically change all of our lives.”

Anthony Bruce felt conflicted. He believed that the return of the land was a form of justice, and a rare example of progress. The money would change their lives, to be sure, but the future his great-great grandparents had started building could never fully be restored.

George Fatheree III, the family’s lawyer, noted that Conrad Hilton Sr., the founder of Hilton Hotels, got his start at around the same time that Willa and Charles Bruce began their beachfront business.

“But fast forward, Hilton’s got a market cap of $40 billion,” Mr. Fatheree said.

The Bruces decided to sell.

The proceeds, split among four Bruce men, would at least allow the Bruces to pass on wealth to younger generations.

“We know that some envisioned that we might hold this piece of land and attempt to reestablish our family’s former enterprise,” the Bruce family said in a statement after announcing the sale. “But we have chosen instead to look to the future. Our decision is to prioritize certainty and urgency over continued uncertainty and delay.”

‘Bigger Than You’

Silvester Johnson and his wife, Laurie, felt compelled to visit Bruce’s Beach on a recent trip to Los Angeles from Seattle. They have no direct connection to the Bruce family or the land, but as a Black family, they had experienced their own difficulties with property rights after the death of a family member.

Mr. Johnson was so moved by the return of the land to the Bruce family that tears streaked down his face as he stood on Bruce’s Beach in December. The Johnsons saw themselves as part of a larger struggle for justice and reparations, and in that way, part of the Bruce story.

The couple blames California officials for what they believe is a below-value sale. But they are also disheartened by the family’s decision to sell.

“Your fight is bigger than you,” Ms. Johnson said.

Kavon Ward, who founded Justice for Bruce’s Beach in 2020 to spearhead the return of the land, said that she, too, had been hoping the Bruces would keep it. “I’m disappointed at what they decided to do with it,” she said.

Ms. Ward, the chief executive of Where Is My Land Inc., a company that helps Black families reclaim property, said she was “still happy they got the land back,” but that she had hoped the Bruce heirs “would really try to realize Charles and Willa Bruce’s vision.”

Thomas W. Mitchell, director of the Initiative on Land, Housing and Property Rights at Boston College Law School, said he understands why many Black Americans would have an emotional attachment to Bruce’s Beach.

“There’s just been harm that has continually impacted Black families in general, but certainly in relationship to their experience with property,” said Mr. Mitchell.

A small minority of Black people collectively owned millions of acres of land in the early 1900s, Mr. Mitchell said. The Bruces, he said, represented a tiny, elite class who overcame myriad obstacles to build wealth, only to have it stripped away.

“The Bruce’s Beach case represents the most robust sense of an actual case of reparations for an individual family,” Mr. Mitchell said, adding, “But it’s just one family.”

“Trying to constrain them and say, ‘Well, this property is important not just to your family, but to the Black community, and you have an obligation to maintain it,’ I think is a little bit paternalistic,” Mr. Mitchell said. Doing that, he said, would rob the Bruce family of a range of options that other property owners have, including the right to sell.

State Senator Steven Bradford, who leads California’s Reparations Task Force, and introduced the bill that authorized the county to return the land, said he supports the Bruce family’s decision.

“In no way does selling the property diminish the powerful example that the return of Bruce’s Beach represents in America,” he said. “They were able to reclaim what was rightfully theirs.”

Patricia Bruce-Carter, a Bruce relative but not an heir to the land, said she was surprised at the sale, but understood the family’s decision. Ms. Bruce-Carter, who grew up in Los Angeles and still lives in the region, assigns her own value to the land.

“Whenever you go there, you have a sense of pride,” she said. “It’s almost as if your ancestors meet you at the park, on the grass or at the beach. It’s just a beautiful, beautiful feeling.”