Why the Bruce’s Beach $20 million sale isn’t a model for reparations

Share

Explore Our Galleries

A man stands in front of the Djingareyber mosque on February 4, 2016 in Timbuktu, central Mali. 
Mali's fabled city of Timbuktu on February 4 celebrated the recovery of its historic mausoleums, destroyed during an Islamist takeover of northern Mali in 2012 and rebuilt thanks to UN cultural agency UNESCO.
TO GO WITH AFP STORY BY SEBASTIEN RIEUSSEC / AFP / SÉBASTIEN RIEUSSEC
African Peoples Before Captivity
Shackles from Slave Ship Henrietta Marie
Kidnapped: The Middle Passage
Enslaved family picking cotton
Nearly Three Centuries Of Enslavement
Image of the first black members of Congress
Reconstruction: A Brief Glimpse of Freedom
The Lynching of Laura Nelson_May_1911 200x200
One Hundred Years of Jim Crow
Civil Rights protest in Alabama
I Am Somebody! The Struggle for Justice
Black Lives Matter movement
NOW: Free At Last?
#15-Beitler photo best TF reduced size
Memorial to the Victims of Lynching
hands raised black background
The Freedom-Lovers’ Roll Call Wall
Frozen custard in Milwaukee's Bronzeville
Special Exhibits
Dr. James Cameron
Portraiture of Resistance

Breaking News!

Today's news and culture by Black and other reporters in the Black and mainstream media.

Ways to Support ABHM?

By Andrew W. Kahrl, Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Virginia

True reparation requires repair, and this solution doesn’t fix the sources of racial inequality in the U.S. real estate system.

Descendants of the original owners of Bruce's Beach on the land
Anthony Bruce, from left, a great-great grandson of Charles and Willa Bruce; wife, Sandra; Kavon Ward, founder of Justice for Bruce’s Beach; Derrick Bruce, great grandson of Charles and Willa Bruce; Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard and Mitch Ward attend a dedication ceremony in Manhattan Beach, Calif., on July 20, 2022. (Jae C. Hong / AP file)

The descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce were finally able to claim their inheritance. In 1924, the city of Manhattan Beach, California, invoked the power of eminent domain to seize two beachfront lots from the couple — who had been using it to operate a popular Black resort — to purge the city of Black beachgoers. Last year, Los Angeles County took the unprecedented move of handing ownership of the property back to the couple’s closest living heirs. Last week, the Bruces’ great-grandsons sold it back to the county for nearly $20 million.

After the sale was announced, some on social media criticized the Bruces’ decision to sell, particularly after a hard-won battle to have the property returned to the family. But they had every right to sell the land and should feel no obligation to hold onto the property merely for its symbolism. 

However, equally as shortsighted is treating this case as a model for reparations for all Black Americans, as some have suggested. Doing so would ignore that true reparation requires repair, and this solution doesn’t address the sources of racial inequality in America’s real estate system.

To understand why, we must first recognize how the Bruces’ lots became so valuable in the first place. In so many real estate markets formed in 20th century America, value was created and capital accumulated through racialized forms of dispossession, while Black exclusion from these same markets served to protect and enhance those values. Manhattan Beach’s pricey real estate market today is due in no small measure to the wealth and whiteness of the people who live there (the city’s median income is nearly three times greater than the national average, and Black people constitute 0.5% of the city’s population). 

For this reason, we should commend Los Angeles County for returning the land to its rightful owners but not assume that merely expanding Black real estate holdings can close a racial wealth gap that these very markets helped to create and perpetuate.

Continue reading this opinion piece.

Our exhibit on racial repair examines the broader issuer.

Our breaking news page connects the past to the present.

Comments Are Welcome

Note: We moderate submissions in order to create a space for meaningful dialogue, a space where museum visitors – adults and youth –– can exchange informed, thoughtful, and relevant comments that add value to our exhibits.

Racial slurs, personal attacks, obscenity, profanity, and SHOUTING do not meet the above standard. Such comments are posted in the exhibit Hateful Speech. Commercial promotions, impersonations, and incoherent comments likewise fail to meet our goals, so will not be posted. Submissions longer than 120 words will be shortened.

See our full Comments Policy here.

Leave a Comment