Bruce’s Beach is in the limelight. On last Sunday a good day was reported and quite a few enjoyed a day at this pleasure place.
-- California Eagle, 18 July 19141
In 2007, Bruce’s Beach in the southern California community of Manhattan Beach was formally commemorated with a park named in its honor and a plaque. The
commemoration was significant: the site had not been known as “Bruce’s Beach” since the Bruce’s black resort business and surrounding settlement had been forced out more than eighty years before. With dispossession, the site’s African American heritage disappeared from public discourse and retreated to private memory for decades. Although officially recognized, the Bruce’s Beach heritage reemergence into public discourse continues to hold a contentious place in the social memory and collective consciousness of the Manhattan Beach community.
In the early part of the twentieth century this place was a leisure and resort site where African Americans mostly from Los Angeles went to enjoy a magnificent view of the Pacific Ocean and the California coastline. But in 1924, Manhattan Beach officials uprooted the African American community through eminent domain condemnation and eviction
proceedings, ostensibly to establish a public park. The process was clearly an excuse to move
1 Remarks in column by J. Allen Reese entitled “Venice, Ocean Park and Santa Monica,” California Eagle,
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the African American families away from the beach. The city did not create a park on the site for almost forty years. In the decades to follow, the city effectively erased the Bruce’s Beach memory from public discourse. This chapter examines the history and commemoration of the site, Bruce’s Beach, and the social context that was the backdrop to the unfolding events impacting it.
African American entrepreneurs Willa and Charles Bruce established a successful resort service business, and a small community of black vacation homeowners emerged in the vicinity by the 1920s. The place flourished as indicated by all accounts. It did so against white property owner resistance to the small resort from its beginning in 1912, and against local government in the 1920s when black actors stood up in peaceful civil disobedience that forced the city government to discontinue discriminatory policies inhibiting African
Americans from Manhattan Beach public shoreline usage. This peaceful, but militant protest would be the first organized action of civil disobedience by the Los Angeles Branch of National Association of Colored People (NAACP).
The understanding of the significance, meaning and remembrance of this place has evolved. From vibrancy in the 1910s and 1920s to silence by 1930, Bruce’s Beach remained relegated to private memory for three quarters of a century. Recollection resurfaced
momentarily, and then resubmerged. Then in the subtext to a public discussion, private whispers of the demise of Bruce’s Beach led to public debate about the necessity to reclaim its history and public remembrance for the current community of Manhattan Beach and beyond in the 1990s to 2000s. As new groups of citizens learned something of the place’s history discussion about memorialization grew louder and commemoration ideas for the site by community members and elected officials surfaced. Multiple Bruce’s Beach memories
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and the city’s racist removal of the site came to contend with other messages leaders wanted inscribed on the site. The Bruce’s Beach commemoration that resulted became a decorous sort of reclamation of history, designed to absolve contemporary white residents of the uncomfortable truths from the past that they found appalling and embarrassing. Their image of themselves was blemished and their respectability tarnished by the injustice of the black community’s dispossession. As the agency of the black pioneers in their social and business practices and fight for their civil rights at Bruce’s Beach was recalled, recounting of their struggle to keep their property and access to the beach, eviction and victimization was eliminated. This absolution of contemporary white residents and the narrow portrayal of black actors’ contributions to the city of Manhattan Beach, shown vividly in the text of the commemorative plaque placed on the signage of the newly named park, suggest how resistance by white residents and their elected proxies’ to recognition of the full purview, effect, and continuance of racism.2
The Bruce’s Beach plaque demonstrates the complexity of the layers of the African American experience and history in Los Angeles, California, and the United States. Among these layers are stories about group and individual migration patterns, socio-economic status, cultural practices, educational and employment opportunities, and social power. Leisure struggles for private and public spaces is another. These layers present narratives of place, time and people, and personal and public memory struggles, which intersect and overlap. They are inseparable from the defining factors of systematic racial exclusion and class exploitation imposed on black and other peoples of color and minority groups.
2 My discussion of contemporary white absolution, identity and the inability to recognize moral, white
people can be racist is informed by scholarship from Robin DiAngelo, “White Fragility,” International Journal
of Critical Pedagogy, V-3 (3) (2011): 54-74; Russ Rymer, American Beach, How ‘Progress’ Robbed a Black Town–and Nation–of History, Wealth, and Power (New York, NY: HarperPerennial, 2009), 70-72.
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African Americans similarly to other Americans moving to California embraced the booster dream of a leisure lifestyle in the outdoors, health and rejuvenation, and economic development opportunities. Their development of beach leisure space in southern California grew as it did elsewhere in the U.S. at the time near eastern, mid-western and southern cities with relatively large African American populations. African American entrepreneurs and residents in the area created services and accommodations for the emerging leisure
community visitors. Their claim to public space and practices of leisure met with opposition by white citizens who made counter public claims with force, assertions of property rights, deployment of local state power and restrictions on public beach access to exclude African American beach front resorts. Bruce’s Beach became contested ground in the development of attractive beaches and resorts free from white citizens harassment. In Los Angeles, leisure presented a distinctive political concern in the nation’s long civil rights movement.3
Scholars have argued that leisure and resorts, though produced by the social economy of industrial capitalism, created a novel cultural political form. The resort was a long way from a standard production of the Industrial Revolution. Resorts and leisure spaces, sites of transitory recreational consumption, depended on a market that started off mostly outside the community and captured attractive public space and amenities in order to attract visitors. Sources of resort life and their production have therefore typically been geographically diverse, fragmentary, and reflecting distinctive aspects of the place of their making, conditions that may complicate many scholars’ execution of research plans in analyzing African American leisure making and contention against it.4
3 Andrew William Kahrl, On The Beach: Race and Leisure in the Jim Crow South (Ph.D. diss., Indiana
University, 2008), ix.
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Scholarly recognition of memory as a site of political power alerts us that the memory of leisure in southern California has also been the product of politics, requiring critical
examination. Like the layers of historical experience, as Delores Hayden discusses in The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (1995), the marking and remembrance of the experience in saving a public past for any city or town is a political, as well as
historical and cultural process. Decisions about what is to be remembered and protected situate the narratives of cultural identity in the collective memory of and history about a place, and remake the place in the process. That is evident in the case of Bruce’s Beach and the century of its making, unmaking, erasure and recovered memory. How that has been achieved and to what effect in Manhattan Beach bears inquiry. Recovery alone does not restore public presence and power in a place, but participants in the memory battle there have believed it has effect. Landmark designation of significant social history sites associated with the cultural landscapes of multiple communities face struggle to recognize various
marginalized groups. In Manhattan Beach, the recovery and struggle to present the fuller story of Bruce’s Beach for the public shows the difficult steps towards a more complex, accurate, and multiply meaningful public memory.5
This research effort re-charts the heritage of the region, by viewing the historic, African American cultural landscape as a place where the region’s whole culture and ‘collective memory’ was constructed. By giving voice to places where this group of people was present, prospered in the past, and contributed to the growth and character of the local community and California this research challenges existing collective memory and demands
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 3.
5 Delores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
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its reframing. Scholarly inscription of a fuller understanding of the past benefits everyone, not only in resetting the frame of the landscape, but in providing additional narrative details for the development or extension of collective or popular memory that is the informally told, collective knowledge or history transmitted between citizens to hopefully encourage the formation of a more inclusive sense of a shared identity. While Asian Americans and Mexican Americans have had a larger numerical presence in the Far West than African Americans until World War II, the larger black population nevertheless begot action and cultural and political figures that gained golden state and national notoriety, making their rights issues a major subject of civic discourse and action.6
Just as participants have had to reclaim their place in the making of the American West’s history, so has the social quest for leisure. The ability to choose leisure and how it would be spend, formally understood as an isolated cultural phenomenon, has become understood as inextricably a matter of social and political meaning. This was especially true of African Americans, who were determined to overcome the legacy of the forced labor of enslavement and Jim Crow laws, to assert control to define themselves and claim community as more than laboring. Leisure was a fundamental field of self-determination. As scholar Mark Fosters asserts, the lives of those African Americans, who were able to defy the odds of relentless oppression to become successful citizens with the ability to take vacations and
6 My discussion of collective memory in this paragraph is informed by scholars Paul Connerton and Martita
Sturken. Connerton, his ideas about the importance of the practice of historical reconstruction as a guide and shaper of the memory of social groups, about communal memory production being formed through more or less informally told narrative histories and that individual interconnecting sets of narratives are the story of groups from which individuals derive their identity, How societies remember (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 14, 17, 21, and Sturken, her ideas about memory as a provider of individual and cultural identity that gives a sense of importance to the past, and its important to understanding of a culture because it indicates collective desires, needs, and self-definitions, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and
the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 1-2; Lawrence B. DeGraaf
and Quintard Taylor, “Introductions,” in Seeking El Dorado: African Americans In California, ed. Lawrence B. DeGraaf, Kevin Mulroy and Quintard Taylor (Autry Museum of Western Heritage and University of
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possibly buy second homes during the Jim Crow era deserve historical attention for their part in making leisure and commemoration against concerted opposition, amid distressingly narrowed opportunities. Their aims and achievements exemplify the diversity of the African American story in social class and patterns that needs to be more fully included in the collective public discourse to give a more complex understanding of the American experience.7
Historic Context: Manhattan Beach and Los Angeles
When Manhattan Beach was founded and the Bruces were purchasing their resort property, thousands of people, white and black from a variety of backgrounds, migrated to “the mythical land” of promise. They came to California and the Los Angeles region in the early decades of the twentieth century for economic opportunities, the climate, health, the beauty of the locale and freedom. Over a generation from 1900 to 1920 the population of the city of Los Angeles grew 82.2% from 102,479 to 576,673 people. Most were optimistic about the prospects to create a better life for themselves in the West. Carey McWilliams observed that the rapidly increasing population facilitated the expansion of the construction industry and its payrolls, new industries emerged, more stores opened, and employment opportunities in the professions and service trades proliferated. While many came with money to invest in homes and maybe other real estate or small entrepreneurial business ventures, most came with only their hands to work and a determination to succeed as their
7 Cindy Sondik Aron, Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States, (New York, NY:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 131, 135; and Deborah Slaton, Chad Randl and Lauren Van Demme, ed.,
Preserve and Play: Preserving Historic Recreation and Entertainment Sites, Conference Proceedings,
(Washington D.C.: Historic Preservation Education Foundation, 2006), xiii; Mark Foster, “In the Face of ‘Jim Crow’: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945,” The Journal of Negro
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assets. With employment earnings and savings, even Los Angeles emigrants of modest means could purchase a house to live in with their families. A few purchased houses they then rented out to newer migrants pouring into the Los Angeles area. Some became wealthy from real estate transactions.8
Of the towns in the southern section of the Santa Monica Bay coastline, Manhattan Beach was one of the latest to begin development in 1902. It did not receive its name until the city was chartered in 1912. Redondo Beach and Hermosa Beach to the south of
Manhattan Beach were already settled communities. The first Santa Fe Railroad train ran into Redondo Beach in 1888. Sand dunes along the coast melded into the inland hills. The Santa Fe Railroad added a small sub-station, and in 1904, the Los Angeles Railway, later called the Pacific Electric Car put in the electric transit line from Marina del Rey to Redondo. Not until these two public transportation systems were constructed did development of Manhattan Beach begin.9
The south section of the city was developed by Steward Merrill, the central area by Frank Daugherty with his associates in the Highland Land Company, and the northern track by wealthy Los Angeles area developer George H. Peck. The land Peck developed ran along the coast inland to the crest of the dune, where one had a “grand view.” The Bruce property was located in the Peck Tract. The original Manhattan Beach homes were wooden structures referred to as cottages, but many of them were little more than sheds. Water was available
8 1900 & 1920 United States Census; Jules Tygiel, “Introduction,” in Metropolis in the Making, Los
Angeles in the 1920s, ed. by Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2001), 7; Lawrence DeGraff, “City of Black Angels: Emergence of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930,”
Pacific Historical Review, no. 39 (1970): 333; Carey McWilliams, Southern California, An Island on the Land
(Salt Lake City, UT: Gibbs-Smith Publisher/Peregrine Smith Books, 1946/1973), xii, 134; J. Max Bond, “The Negro in Los Angeles” (PhD diss, University of Southern California, 1936), 129.
9 Judson Grenier, Manhattan Beach: Yesterdays, Manhattan Beach Historical Series Publication Number
3, (Manhattan Beach, CA: City of Manhattan Beach Historical Committee, 1976), 1-3; “The History of
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from two central wells and it had to be delivered in buckets. Each of these developers did the typical promotions of the day to attract buyers to purchase sites in Manhattan Beach,
including free train rides, auto tours and free lunches.10
In the early years of the city’s development people from Los Angeles and Pasadena could take the Pacific Electric car and arrive in little more than an hour at this summer retreat, where only twelve families lived year round. The first pier with concrete pilings and decking was built in 1923. A dance pavilion and bathhouse were built at the shore end of the pier. Sand was a symbol and a problem for early Manhattan Beach residents. As the wind would spread the sand in drifts, dunes shifted, boardwalks and streets were inundated, and homes destabilized. Remaining largely intact, the northern dunes in the Peck Tract were more stable. This area saw desert scenes filmed for Hollywood movies in the 1920s and 1930s.11
To promote civic improvement in 1909 two organizations formed: The Manhattan Beach Improvement Association, and the Neptunian Women’s Club. The city’s first
government was formed at incorporation in 1912. The City Marshall directed volunteer law enforcement officers and firefighters. After World War I, Manhattan Beach had flappers, moonshine and fast drivers passing through town, but it was still a small family-oriented, mostly white town. In the 1930s, during the Depression years fishing and swimming were very popular. In 1928 the pier was extended to improve fishing and encourage more visitors.12
10 Grenier, 2.
11 Grenier, 5, 8; “The History of Manhattan Beach: Earliest History,” Manhattan Beach Public Library,
Historical Document Files, 8; Cecilia Rasmussen, “City Smart.” Los Angeles Times, November 29, 1996.
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The community began as a residential community with little industry and commercial development. Even though it was subdivided early, Manhattan Beach developed more slowly than other areas in the region as the developers were not required to furnish all of the
improvements, which became standard features of later developed tracts. Residents were required to pay for such improvements as water, sewers, drainage, streets, curbs and sidewalks, street lighting and parks by special assessment improvement districts. A large percentage of the city’s sanitary sewers were slow to be constructed, and more than 50% of the city’s streets did not have gutters, curbs and paving until the 1950s. The city’s drainage system was not fully constructed until after 1958.13
Until 1949, Manhattan Beach had a winter population of less than one half of the summer population. In 1920, Manhattan Beach had a population of 859. By 1931 it was 1,891; and by 1940 there were 6,398 people. Most of the area’s growth occurred after World War II, with the aircraft industry springing up on Aviation Boulevard and population growth in the Los Angeles metropolitan area and freeway improvements making the area desirable and accessible for commuters. In 2013 the population of Manhattan Beach slightly exceeded 35,700. Its barren sand dunes of yester-year have evolved into “a prosperous,
[overwhelmingly white] enclave of the South Bay with a prestigious address, a town that has become home to aging baby boomers building wood and mortar castles by the sand.”14
African Americans visiting Manhattan Beach in the 1910s and 1920s, rode out from Los Angeles on the Pacific Electric Car, came by automobile or by bus. They congregated at
13 “The Growth and Progress of the City of Manhattan Beach,” Manhattan Beach Public Library, no date. 14 Ibid., “The Growth and Progress of the City of Manhattan Beach,” Manhattan Beach Public Library, no