After being turned away from other coastal cities, Willa and Charles Bruce purchased property along the Strand in Manhattan Beach on February 19, 1912, to create a beach resort for the area’s Black community. By 1916, Bruce’s Beach had become a thriving destination for visiting Blacks, with a restaurant, dancehall, changing rooms, and showers. Several other Black families soon bought property and built homes in the area, including Major George Prioleau and Mrs. Ethel Prioleau, Elizabeth Patterson, Mary R. Sanders, Milton and Anna Johnson, John McCaskill and Elzia L. Irvin, and James and Lulu Slaughter. In the era of Jim Crow and racial segregation, the Bruces, their patrons, and other Black property owners faced harassment, intimidation, and discrimination from some local residents and City Hall, aimed at making Manhattan Beach inhospitable to Black residents and visitors. White residents ultimately pressured the City Council to use eminent domain to acquire the land for a public park, condemning the properties of the Bruces, Prioleaus, Johnsons, Patterson, and Sanders, along with twenty-five undeveloped White-owned properties among them. The city now acknowledges that this action was racially motivated and wrong.
