BRUCE’S BEACH: A hundred years later, the Prioleau family returns to Manhattan Beach
by Mark McDermott and Elka Worner Ancestors loom larger in some families than in others. A bus pulled up to Bruce’s Beach Park two Saturday mornings ago, and 38 people disembarked, including 23 descendents, representing four generations, of a family that once lived on this land. In a very real sense, George and Ethel Prioleau had returned home for the first time in nearly a century. The family was led by matriarch Anna King Gonzales, a granddaughter of the Prioleuas who grew up hearing the tragic tale of what had occurred in Manhattan Beach, and whose own activism last year, at the age of 90, helped inspire an official apology from the City of Manhattan Beach. “Our grandparents provided us a beginning,” Gonzales said, standing where the Prioleau cottage once stood. “This was a part of their beginning. And we are now able to experience what they went through as the history of our family.” Neither Major George Prioleau nor Ethel were people to shy from an uphill fight. Few men ever fought harder for the American dream than George Washington Prioleau. He was born a slave in South Carolina in 1856, but later earned his theology degree and rose to prominence, in Ohio, as a professor…
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