by Mark McDermott
The Manhattan Beach City Council’s yearlong effort to set the history of Bruce’s Beach aright hit another snag Tuesday night when council members failed to come to an agreement on the language for a new plaque meant to better represent what occurred a century ago.
In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and the local Justice for Bruce’s Beach movement, the Council in August 2020 created the Bruce’s Beach Task Force, appointing residents to an advisory panel tasked with crafting an apology to the Bruce family, compiling a history, and exploring ways to publicly represent that history.
The apology never happened. A council majority instead issued an acknowledgment and a condemnation of what occurred at Bruce’s Beach. Mayor pro tem Steve Napolitano, who along with Mayor Hildy Stern co-chaired the Task Force and argued for an apology, said on Tuesday night the council had erred in this decision but defended its much-maligned efforts to better acknowledge the history of Bruce’s Beach.
“I’m not going to re-litigate why we did this, why we are here,” Napolitano said. “It was right to do when we started down this path, it’s still the right thing to do today. The only failure for this city has been the failure to apologize. We should still do that. Tonight, though we’re here to talk about the language that’s supposed to go on a plaque that’s already been written, that’s already been accepted by this council.”
The Task Force’s History Advisory Board issued a 75-page history of Bruce’s Beach that was accepted by the Council in June. That report detailed how Charles and Willa Bruce purchased beachfront property on 26th Street and the Strand in 1912, and despite facing immediate backlash from their neighbors — including one of the city’s founders, George Peck, who on the first Sunday after the opening of Bruce’s Lodge placed constables and barriers on the beach that required Black beachgoers to walk a half-mile to reach the ocean — built a thriving business and attracted a small community of other Black homeowners on the same block over the next decade. In 1927, the City utilized the power of eminent domain to force the purchase of the land, at market value, from the Bruces and the other Black families, as well as white property owners who had not built on their parcels. The History Advisory Board uncovered correspondence from city leaders at the time and a later admission by a former member of the city’s Board of Trustees showing that the taking of the land had been racially motivated.
“At one time, we thought that the Negro problem was going to stop our progress,” wrote former trustee Frank Daugherty, who was also one of the city’s three original developers, in a local newspaper in 1943. “…We had to acquire these two blocks to solve the problem, so we voted to condemn them and make a city park there. We had to protect ourselves. Our attorney advised members of the council never to admit the real purpose and establishment of the park, especially during the council meetings.”
Members of the History Advisory Board (HAB), which faced vitriolic public criticism backed by a viral, anonymous newsletter attacking its work, were tasked with writing the history report and then taking language from the report and condensing it into descriptions for two plaques. They presented that language Tuesday night.
“We worked exclusively off of the history report that was adopted at the June 7 meeting,” HAB member Tyler St. Bernard told the council. “No new facts or information have been added. It’s just been compiled and broken down into a more readable format for the plaques.”
HAB member Lindsey Fox said that over the last year she and her colleagues had worked 20 to 30 hours a week on the history report, including 49 public meetings and extensive research time, adding up to between 1,500 and 2,000 hours of volunteer time, an amount comparable to a doctoral dissertation.
“Much like a dissertation, our work was reviewed by several experts from UCLA Department of African American Studies, UCLA Center X, and the Gould School of Law at USC…Personally, I spent more time on this than my master’s thesis on education. I don’t think that you’ll find three people who have more expertise in the area,” Fox said.
HAB member Kristen Long emphasized that nothing in the report or the plaque language was influenced by political leanings.
“This has not been an easy task, not only because this is an issue that serves up a lot of emotion, but because we are civilians trying to do a public service during a pandemic with limited accessible resources,” Long said. “It’s pretty frustrating. We’ve taken your notes and implemented them, and we also listened to public comment from residents and non-residents…The report and language that the History Advisory Board generated is nonpartisan. I don’t know how to stress that enough.”
The proposed plaques will include QR codes that link to the full history report. Long said city historian Jan Dennis commended the report but said the plaque language — just under 800 words for each of the two proposed plaques — was too long.
“We agree,” Long said. “But because we were given no parameters, we erred on the side of length as opposed to brevity at this point in the process.”
Councilmembers Joe Franklin and Suzanne Hadley both argued that the plaque language depicted the history of Bruce’s Beach too negatively.
Hadley engaged in a line of inquiry regarding the Slaughter family, a Black family which opened up a lodging house adjacent to the Bruce’s Beach properties right after the other families lost their homes to eminent domain.
“Were there Black families living in Manhattan Beach after the Bruce’s move to Los Angeles?” Hadley asked.
“Yes,” Long said.
“And there is at least one documented case of a Black-owned business operating after the condemnation proceedings, correct?” Hadley asked.
“Yes, insofar as the Slaughters,” Long said.
The Slaughters had left Manhattan Beach by 1930. As the history report documents, their experience in those three years was hardly a positive one. Their lodge opened Memorial Day weekend 1927, the same day Bruce’s Lodge closed, but that weekend police gave warnings to 25 Black beachgoers for swimming off Bruce’s Beach. On July 4, police jailed Elizabeth Catley, a 19-year-old friend of the two Slaughter daughters, Willine and Estella, who stayed on the beach while Catley swam and was arrested for doing so. This incident inspired a NAACP-led “swim-in” two weeks later that eventually forced city leaders to allow Black people full access to local beaches, a much-heralded civil rights breakthrough. But according to several news accounts unearthed by HAB, the Slaughters encountered further harassment that October, when men in hoods attempted to burn down their lodge, fired gunshots, and left a burning cross across the street. A Grand Jury investigation was launched into the matter. “Nearby Town Now Center of Race War,” read the headline of Venice Evening Vanguard. “Dynamite, bullets and the secret torch are all alleged to have been employed by residents in order to induce the negroes to travel.”
The Council in June directed the HAB to not include references, on the plaques, to Ku Klux Klan activities in the area at the time, arguing such influence had not been sufficiently documented. The Grand Jury investigation, which according to news accounts linked leaders in several South Bay communities to the KKK, was never completed for unknown reasons.
“Why it never came to fruition, why no charges were pressed, or why no witnesses were called — it’s unclear, because all of the newspaper articles about it stopped immediately at the end of February 1928,” Long said. “And when we asked [USC Gould School of Law’s] Dr. Ariela Gross about that, she said it wouldn’t be uncommon for a sitting panel of white men to overlook this, or not press charges.”
Franklin questioned Long regarding language on the proposed Strand plaque regarding the opposition the Bruces faced.
“Harassment of the Bruces and their guests by some White neighbors occurred immediately after the resort opened,” the plaque language states. “According to the Los Angeles Times, ‘No Trespassing signs were posted in front of the Bruces’ resort on a strip of beach owned by subdivider George Peck, where visitors were confronted by two deputy constables who warned them against crossing the strip of land in front of Mrs. Bruce’s property to reach the ocean.”
“They opened the resort in 1912,” Franklin said. “Most of the instances of harassment released from the history report I saw occurred in the ‘20s. Are there examples that are missing that occurred immediately…in 1912?”
Long replied that the LA Times account was from 1912 and included a quote from Willa Bruce regarding that harassment. “Whenever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort, we have been refused,” Bruce said. “But I own this land, and I am going to keep it.”
Franklin said that he had driven to the location of the property the Bruces had purchased after being forced to leave Manhattan Beach, in South Central Los Angeles, and suggested that the fact that they owned this, and two other commercial properties suggested the $14,500 settlement they’d received had not left the family financially bereft.
“So what I’m getting at is that there’s been reports that they were broke, that they were destitute when they left Manhattan Beach, and I’m just thinking ‘Wait, they bought three pieces of property. How would they do that if they were broke and destitute?’” Franklin said.
Hadley said that she had attended the unveiling of the plaque honoring the Uyematsu family at Mira Costa High School last weekend and was struck by how positive the entire event was — both the short, factual language on the plaque, which included no photos (the HAB has also selected several historical photos of the families and Black community at Bruce’s Beach), and the lack of recrimination or controversy surrounding the history. The Uyematsu family owned 120 acres of what is now the high school but were imprisoned as part of the Japanese-American internment program during WWII. The dire circumstances of their imprisonment required them to sell the land.
“It just bums me out that none of that goodwill seems to be coming out with Bruce’s Beach,” Hadley said. “I do think the plaque language now is too punitive. It’s too negative. There are too many assumptions and inferences and salacious quotes….Let’s let the plaque be something inscribed in stone that we’re proud of. It’s accurate, and it’s difficult, and it doesn’t whitewash. I stand by everything I said: some bad things were done to the Bruces for not great reasons. And guess what? The same thing happened with Chavez Ravine and the same thing happened with the 105 Freeway and the same thing happened with the Uyematsu family. The history of man is about man’s inhumanity to man. So I said it early on, I will not brand this community with a scarlet R. The plaque needs to be reduced. It needs to be more positive and more measured.”
Councilmember Richard Montgomery suggested only the plaque on the Strand be erected, since that is nearest where the Bruce’s Lodge existed, and that the language be severely pared down.
“I urge brevity,” Montgomery said. “This is one chance to get it right. Someone mentioned earlier that we’ve been ridiculed by national papers across the country. Well, I personally don’t care what the New York Times thinks about Manhattan Beach….We acknowledged the wrong and are doing our best to put the history out there for everyone to see. Our job, my job, is to protect the City of Manhattan Beach, over and over and over. That’s it. That’s all we have to do.”
Stern said that the entire idea behind the plaques was to provide education on what occurred at Bruce’s Beach, and pointed to the Belamar Project in Santa Monica, an extensive series of public art and plaques that documents a Black community displaced in the 1950s for the construction of a Civic Center.
“I would encourage any of you to please go and see what a very expansive explanation of the history looks like, because it doesn’t have to be a certain number of words,” Stern said. “It needs to be an appropriate way to explain the history. And it was quoted in the LA Times that this was once a vibrant Black neighborhood that was erased by racism. So we don’t need to be afraid or hide behind the fact that these are the occurrences that happened in our history, but rather to be able to explain them so that we can understand them and educate and embrace that kind of history.”
Montgomery made a motion to end the HAB and turn the task of editing the language to a two-person council subcommittee. He volunteered to serve on the subcommittee, and Franklin also immediately volunteered. But then Napolitano and Stern, the co-chairs of the Bruce’s Beach Task Force and the two most supportive council members of the HAB’s work, also volunteered. City Attorney Quinn Barrow told Stern that it was at the mayor’s discretion to appoint the subcommittee. Stern said she would make that decision at the next council meeting.
“I am not going to make that decision right now,” Stern said.
After the meeting, Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, a relative of the Bruce family who serves as its spokesperson, said he was aghast at the line of questioning that suggested that the Bruce family left Manhattan Beach in any way whole.
“No matter what they do, they continue to have big red ‘Rs’ for racist written on their chests,” Shepard said. “If due diligence had been done by [Councilperson Franklin] he would have known that the judgment for the settlement was handed down in 1929, [after] Charles and Willa left Manhattan Beach,” Shepard said. “But they didn’t receive the money until 1932. By that time they were living in abject poverty struggling to survive and working as cooks in other people’s restaurants and the home they had in east Los Angeles was in foreclosure…Charles passed away in 1931 and never saw the fruits of settlement, and Willa passed away in 1934 still in poverty and medical debt.”
That part of the history, Shepard said, did not make it into the report.
“The committee wasn’t that interested in the oral traditions that were handed down in the family because they couldn’t be proven by any documents,” he said. “They just wanted to placate the Council into accepting something near the truth, which I warned them they would never do, and so you have it.” ER
