Bruce family to sell its Bruce's Beach property back to LA County for $20 million
The Bruce family has decided to sell its portion of the Manhattan Beach Bruce's Beach property back to the County of Los Angeles for nearly $20 million after the beach front property was recently deeded back to the family in a landmark decision to rectify the city's eminent domain acquisition of the property nearly a century ago.
The Chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Janice Hahn, announced Jan. 3 that "They (the Bruce family) feel what is best for them is selling this property back to the County for nearly $20 million and finally rebuilding the generational wealth they were denied for nearly a century. This is what reparations look like and it is a model that I hope governments across the country will follow," said Hahn in a written statement.
On July 20, 2022, Los Angeles County officials handed the property deed over to Bruce family members during a ceremony on the Bruce's Beach property, which is where the L.A. County Lifeguard Training Center is located at 26th Street and The Strand. It was the first time the government has ever made appropriations for land taken from a Black family.
"The seizure of Bruce's Beach nearly a century ago was an injustice inflicted upon not just Willa and Charles Bruce but generations of their descendants who almost certainly would have been millionaires," wrote Hahn.
Bruce's Beach was so renamed by the Manhattan Beach City Council in 2006, as a first step toward righting the wrongs that were done to the Bruce family who purchased and owned the segregated property and ran it as a beach recreation area with a lodge, dining hall and fishing pier for the Black community. Racism drove the Bruces off the property, which was reclaimed by the city of Manhattan Beach in 1924 by eminent domain.
Since then, the property/park went through various names until the 2006 Bruce's Beach plaque went up at the site. Then Manhattan Beach Mayor, Mitch Ward, the city's first and only Black mayor, led the renaming campaign.
The City of Manhattan Beach is currently working on a new updated plaque, accounting for a factual, historical rendition of the property to be placed at the top of the grassy knolled park.