Bruce’s Beach, Manhattan Beach: Dispossession
Third in a series by Mark McDermott By the first years of the 1920s, Manhattan Beach was coming together. In the decade since its founding, what had been mostly a scattering of sandswept shacks emerged as an actual town. A city hall was built and residents approved bonds to construct both a waterworks and a pier with a distinctive octagonal roundhouse at its end. The city’s population had increased, albeit modestly, from 600 people to almost 900. But one particular segment of the population was growing in a way that some people in the city found concerning. Ten months before the city incorporated in late 1912, at the foot of a sand dune between 26th and 27th streets, Willa and Charles Bruce established a resort for African Americans. What began as a portable cottage and stand selling soda pop and lunch and renting bathing suits by the ‘20s had expanded to three buildings, including a dance hall, cafe, and lodgings. Willa Bruce was the embodiment of a new kind of American dream. She was originally from Missouri, where her mother had once been a slave, and had come out West with her husband during the first decade of the new century in hopes of finding a greater freedom than was…
Read this story on easyreadernews.com