What happened at Bruce’s Beach
Charles and Willa Bruce made a stand that continues to reverberate a century later by Mark McDermott Second of three parts On June 17, 1912, Willa and Charles Bruce opened Bruce’s Beach resort. It was a modest operation located on a sparsely populated stretch of beach in an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County. Later that year, the area would officially become Manhattan Beach, but even within the fledgling city of 600, Bruce’s Beach was an outpost. It sat below the crest of a dune, near developer George Peck’s precarious wooden pier and pavilion, neither of which would survive the decade. Willa Bruce had come an unfathomable distance from her upbringing in Missouri in the 1860s. Missouri had been a slave state and, during the Civil War years of Bruce’s early childhood, a fiercely violent border state populated by both Confederate and Union army supporters. Willa’s mother had been a slave. Willa and Charles, who met and married in New Mexico, arrived at the California coast pursuing a dream. Like so many other Black Americans, they had come West in search of a truer freedom than the rest of Jim Crow America allowed. But also like so many others, they were beginning to find…
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