3: We Can’t Change the Past- Government Lessons in Making Amends

Introduction

In 2022, two prominent elected women uttered the same words, “We can’t change the past.” One, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, was discussing a recently received federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation which will help the state and the City of Detroit replace the 60-year old I-375 freeway with a more accessible street-level boulevard (Schuster 2022). Like many freeways built in the U.S. in the 1960s, I-375 cut through two prosperous Black neighborhoods, displacing 130,000 people, closing houses of worship, uprooting family businesses, and wiping out generations of family wealth (Brooker 2021; Michigan Office of the Governor 2022). The new boulevard promises to reconnect neighbors and neighborhoods in areas of the city that have experienced rapid residential and commercial growth in recent years.

The second woman to note that “we can’t change the past” was Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member, Janice Hahn (Martinez and Kurland 2022). On June 28, 2022, the LA County Board of Supervisors returned beachfront property to the Bruce family, nearly 100 years after the City of Manhattan Beach had essentially stolen it from its original owners, Willa and Charles Bruce. The Bruces ran a popular resort for Black Angelinos at a time when most Southern California beaches were segregated. This case study considers what it means to make amends for historic injustice, including who should be responsible, what actions are required, and to whom amends are due. In particular, it highlights the story of Bruce’s Beach, a plot of land along the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles County which was unjustly taken, and eventually returned to the family of its rightful owners.

Reparations in Practice and Theory

The idea of government making amends, or reparations, is not new in the United States. Most notably it was practiced when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which made formal apology and provided $20,000 to each survivor of the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II (Johnson 1988). As the U.S. entered the war in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which allowed the incarceration of over 125,000 people of Japanese descent, primarily American citizens and legal resident aliens, under the guise that they posed a threat to national security after Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor. Rounded up with only what they could carry, tens of thousands of families were forced from their homes, put on trains, and sent to one of dozens of assembly centers and ultimately to armed camps, most of which were in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas (https://ireizo.com/about[1]). At least two of those incarcerated were 90 years old, and hundreds of children were born in the camps. Most of these families lost their homes, businesses, and livelihoods. The last camp closed in 1946.

While this history was largely ignored for the next thirty years, in 1979 the National Council for Japanese Americans Redress was formed to organize efforts to seek reparations for survivors of the camps (Yoshida 2021). As a result of their efforts, congress created a U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), and in 1982 the Commission’s report noted that there had been no military analysis, nor was there any justification for the mass incarceration. Rather, “The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and failure of political leadership” (CWRIC 1982, p. 18). These efforts, and several years of congressional wrangling, lead to the reparations provided by the Civil Liberties Act of 1988.

Reparations for Blacks who had been kidnapped and subject to enslavement, and to their descendants, was the premise of “forty acres and a mule,” the unfulfilled promise that the U.S. government made at the end of the Civil War. At that time, Field Order 15 set aside 400,000 acres of Confederate owned land for distribution to the formerly enslaved (Ray & Perry, 2020; see Sarah McCammon podcast, below). After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, President Andrew Johnson took over the White House and Johnson rescinded Field Order 15, returning the land to former slave holders. With little recourse, many Blacks worked as sharecroppers on the same fields for the same families that had previously enslaved them.

It is clear that the impact of slave labor to the U.S. economy was immense. It has been argued that “America's emergence as a major industrial nation was possible only because of the massive input provided by slave labor at a time when labor was the scarce factor in the American production function” (Browne 1972, p. 41). Their work in cotton fields, on railroads, and in the early infrastructure of the nation, including building the White House and the Capitol Building, led directly to vast wealth among plantation owners, and to U.S. economic growth in general (Browne 1972; Coates 2014; Wright 2020). An exact valuation of that labor, however, is still debated among historians and economists (Wright 2020), as is the concept of economic reparations for descendants of the enslaved.

Seeking Reparations: Compensatory Justice

Among the first calls for Black reparations in the modern era came in 1969, against the backdrop of the Black Power Movement when James Forman, speaking on behalf of the Black Economic Development Conference, commandeered the dais of New York City’s Riverside Church to read The Black Manifesto (The Riverside Church n.d.; SNCC n.d.). The Manifesto was a demand for $500 million in economic reparations from America’s white churches and synagogues as recognition of organized religion’s complicity—both knowingly and unknowingly—in the subjugation of Black Americans from slavery through Jim Crow (see Muhammad Kenyatta interview, below). Forman’s argument was largely based on what political philosophers refer to as claims of compensatory or reparative justice, the need for specific remedies in order to alleviate historical injustices (Forrester 2019).

Forman’s call for reparations was widely debated along several lines (Forrester 2019). First, among progressives, Civil Rights leaders worried that Forman’s tactics were too incendiary and not likely to gain broad support. Many also disagreed with The Black Manifesto’s targeting of religious institutions rather than government, which was regarded by some as the only institution, “through the use of its tax monies, [that] can truly compensate blacks for centuries of slavery, injury, and degradation” (Bedau 1972, p. 41). Current debates between proponents involve what reparations from government might look like: Lump sum payments? Payments over time? Free 2- or 4-year college education? Forgiveness of student loan debt? Grants for home ownership or business start-ups? (Ray & Perry, 2021).

Another approach has been to seek reparations from private corporations. In a 2002 class action lawsuit, In Re African-American Slave Descendants, plaintiffs filed suit against a list of major U.S. corporations, arguing that they “had profited from slavery by either insuring slaves, lending to owners, or, in some cases, even owning slaves, and that those who descended from slaves have various civil claims arising from this corporate involvement in slavery” (Innis 2010, p. 652). This lawsuit, and a subsequent re-filing in 2005, were both dismissed in federal court.

Opponents of reparations have a number of different lines of argument as well. On questions of federal reparations, one argument is that the U.S. government did not engage in slavery, thus demands for reparations should be made to southern states, not the federal government (Epstein 2004). Relatedly, families of Union Army soldiers killed in the Civil War could argue that their anti-slavery debt has been paid. Similarly, other groups whose ancestors faced systematic injustices could argue that they deserve reparations themselves. Determining who is eligible for compensation is among the most difficult questions surrounding reparations (Hassan & Healy 2019). Determining who should bear the burden is another problem, as many argue that they should not be held responsible, nor should their tax dollars be used to fix a problem they did not cause (Breslau & Butler 2023). Some have suggested that programs like Affirmative Action or even welfare, which are said to compensate for current inequities, should be counted as a form of reparations (Epstein 2004; Forrester 2019).

Federal Inaction leads California to Act

By the late 1970s the Civil Rights era was largely over, and the subject of federal government reparations had generally fallen from public conversation. However, U.S. Congressman John Conyers of Michigan brought the issue to Congress in 1989 by introducing House Resolution (HR) 40, calling for a commission to study the long-term impacts of slavery on Black America and consider appropriate remedies (Coates 2014). Although Conyers re-introduced HR 40 every year from 1989 until his death in 2019, it was never voted out of committee until 2021 (Summers, 2023; see Juana Summers interview, below). Further, although it was voted out of committee, HR 40 was not sent to the floor of the House of Representatives for a vote in 2021. Thus, while public discussion of reparations has been reinvigorated over the past decade due to a variety of factors including a much-debated 2014 article, “The Case for Reparations,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the murder of George Floyd being designated a new era of “racial reckoning,” and HR 40 finally being voted out of committee, a serious discussion of Black reparations continues to stall at the federal level.

Seeing little progress in Washington DC, in 2020 the State of California became the first to create a Reparations Task Force to study the effects of slavery and discrimination against its Black residents (Fry 2023a). Among task force recommendations are a California African American Freedmen Affairs Agency to process claims for reparations which would be provided to Black Californians who have experienced damages in five areas: housing discrimination, unfair/uncompensated property takings, devaluation of businesses, harm to personal health, and harm from mass incarceration. The task force of economists, scholars, and policymakers has worked through different models of reparations, estimating economic loss depending on two key factors: what category/ies of damages one experienced, and how long one has lived in the state (Fry 2023b). Its final recommendations noted that while California joined the U.S. as a “free” state in 1850, it offered no protections to Black people, and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing for capture and return of those who fled enslavement, until emancipation in 1863 (Associated Press 2023). Recommendations include a formal apology to descendants—limited to those whose families were in the U.S. in the 19^th century—and reparations of cash or some cash equivalent. Once finished with its work, the California State Legislature will have to vote on a final program of reparations (Fry 2023b).

While economists, philosophers, and politicians debate these issues, many local government leaders are learning about injustices in their own backyards, and seeking remedies. Such was the case when, in April 2021, Los Angeles County Supervisor, Janice Hahn, announced that a parcel of land in her district known as Bruce’s Beach would be returned to the family of its original owners nearly 100 years after the beachfront property had been seized by the City of Manhattan Beach (City News Service 2021). Given the value of Southern California real estate, the estimated value of the property was $20M.

The history of Bruce’s Beach has been well documented by the County of Los Angeles (Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County n.d.; see CEO LAC video, below), and the City of Manhattan Beach (2021). In 1912, even before Manhattan Beach had been granted incorporation as a city, Mrs. Willa Bruce[2] bought the parcel as a resort for Black residents to swim, fish, relax, and enjoy the beach. She and her husband, Charles, called the property Bruce Beach Front, and opened for business in June 1912. Within a week, White residents began harassing guests, but neither Mrs. Bruce nor her patrons were deterred. In response to this harassment, she told reporters with the Los Angeles Times, “Wherever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort we have been refused…but I own this land, and I am going to keep it” (City of Manhattan Beach 2021, p. 6). Bruce Beach Front thrived over the next decade, allowing the Bruces to build a lodge and acquire an additional lot for expansion of their business in 1920.

Their success encouraged other Black families to purchase property in the area, some building vacation homes, to create a small community and one of the few beaches that welcomed Blacks in the region (Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County n.d.). Although the Bruces, their Black neighbors, and their resort guests continued to face harassment in various forms—fake No Parking and No Trespassing signs, fires started in and around their homes, Ku Klux Klan members harassing Black fishermen with racist pamphlets—the community flourished (City of Manhattan Beach 2021).

In 1921, however, White real estate agents brought a petition before the Manhattan Beach City Council, seeking to have Bruce Beach Front condemned. Council members, fearing they would be considered bigots if they took the land, did not acquiesce (City of Manhattan Beach 2021). In 1924, however, one of the agents found a loophole through the Park and Playground Act of 1909 which allowed the city to use eminent domain[3] to seize the Bruce’s property under the pretense of building a public park. In addition to the Bruce property, the city seized the property of five other Black families, along with a number of empty lots owned by Whites. The Black families filed racial discrimination suits against the city, but these suits were dismissed and the City was granted the right to seize and condemn the property with minimal reimbursement. While the Bruces asked for $70,000 for their property and $50,000 in damages, the City, with court approval, paid them only $14,500 in compensation. In 1927, the Bruce family moved out of Manhattan Beach for good. The city promptly tore down all buildings on the properties, but did not build a park on the confiscated land until thirty years later, in 1956.

By the time the park was built, the property’s history was largely forgotten and its name had changed several times. Eventually, as a result of a City of Manhattan Beach project called Facts on Plaques, the history of Bruce’s Beach began to resurface. In 2006, the city’s first Black council member sought to rename the park and honor the memory of the Bruce family (Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County n.d.). After much discussion among council members and “emotional speeches” from residents, many of whom “wore large paper hearts with ‘BB’ written on them,” the city council voted, 3-2, to honor this history by renaming the park Bruce’s Beach (City of Manhattan Beach 2021, p. 23).

The current plaque at the site reads

Bruce's Beach

After being turned away from other coastal cities, Willa and Charles Bruce acquired property along the Strand in Manhattan Beach to create a beach resort for the Black community on February 19, 1912. By 1916, the resort known as “Bruce’s Beach” was a thriving fixture for the Black community, with a restaurant, dancehall, changing rooms, and showers.

Soon after, several other Black families purchased property in and near the current location of the park. Major George Prioleau and Mrs. Ethel Prioleau, Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Sanders, Milton and Anna Johnson, John McCaskill and Elzia L. Irvin, and James and Lula Slaughter built homes on their property.

Unfortunately, not everyone in Manhattan Beach welcomed the Bruces’ enterprise and its crowds of Black patrons in that era of Jim Crow and racial segregation.

The Bruces, their patrons, and the other Black property owners in the area faced harassment, intimidation, and discrimination by some, including City Hall. These actions aimed to make Manhattan Beach inhospitable to Black residents and visitors.

Enough White residents ultimately pressured the City Council to exercise its power of eminent domain to acquire the land for use as a public park. As a result, the City condemned the properties of the Bruces, the Prioleaus, the Johnsons, Ms. Patterson, and Ms. Sanders. In addition, twenty-five White-owned properties that sat undeveloped among the Black-owned properties were also condemned.

The City’s actions at the time was [sic] racially motivated and wrong. Today, the City acknowledges and condemns those past actions, and empathizes with those whose property was seized. We are not the Manhattan Beach of one hundred years ago. We reject racism, hate, intolerance, and exclusion.

This park is named in memory of Bruce’s Beach and in recognition of Manhattan Beach’s next one hundred years as a city of respect and inclusion.

Dedicated 2022 (Fratello 2022)

Returning Bruce’s Beach

Thus far, the story of Bruce’s Beach has focused on the role of the city, however, as is often the case in local government, the county in which the city resides, and the state itself, have major roles to play in land use and land acquisition. In 1995, for example, Los Angeles County had been involved in several land transfers between Manhattan Beach and the state of California (Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County n.d.). By the time that Janice Hahn was elected the area’s supervisor, the site of the Bruces’ original resort was owned by the county, and home to the Los Angeles County Lifeguard Administration Building. This meant that amends for the injustice done to the Bruce family could be made by the LA County Board of Supervisors, who were unanimously in support of doing so. In public documents, the county noted, “Government has a responsibility to prohibit and eliminate racial discrimination in all forms and to ensure that all persons are entitled to security against forced removal, harassment, and intimidation by entities who seek to deprive individuals of their rights to self-determination and dignity on the basis of their race. In righting this historic wrong, the County is acting in the public’s interest to ensure that communities can fairly access justice and an effective remedy, including, when appropriate, the potential return, restitution, resettlement, rehabilitation, or compensation, for unlawful and race-based displacements” (Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County n.d., n.p.).

Although the County Board of Supervisors favored returning the beach to the Bruce family, state law prohibits public beaches from being sold or transferred without state approval, therefore Supervisors Hahn and Holly Mitchell (who, as a result of redistricting, now represented Bruce’s Beach), sought the assistance of State Senator, Steven Bradford. In 2021, Bradford sponsored Senate Bill 796, a state law that would allow the county to return Bruce’s Beach to Willa and Charles’s legal heirs. The state legislature unanimously voted for the bill and Governor Newsom signed it at the beach, surrounded by members of the Bruce family (Xia 2021). The property was returned to Willa and Charles Bruce’s great-grandsons in a formal public ceremony in July 2022. However, because the property remains a public beach that is not zoned for development, terms of the property settlement required the county to provide a $413,000 annual lease to the Bruce family, and offer the family the option to sell the property back to the county within two years, for $20M (Ellis 2023). In January 2023, the family announced that it would take the sell-back option, selling their property to the county, but this time on their own terms and at fair market value.

One to Watch

Stories of the injustices done to Native Americans can and have filled volumes.[4] A complicated example comes from Palm Springs, today considered a desert oasis for tourists and site of weekend homes for many of the rich and famous. In the 1870s, when Native American reservations were created in the area, among the land granted to the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians was 1-square mile known as Section 14 in what would become downtown Palm Springs (Brown 2015). As the city began to develop a base of wealthy homeowners and tourists, the need for service employees grew, however, as with many resort communities, affordable housing was nonexistent. At the same time, the federal government restricted leases on Indian land to only 5 years, making it impossible to secure home mortgages or development projects. Thus, the Tribe was restricted from selling or leasing the land, and instead rented plots in Section 14 to Palm Springs’ working class—largely Blacks and Latinos who worked as housekeepers and groundskeepers in the homes and resorts of wealthy residents and tourists. Section 14 was tribal land so the city collected no property taxes on it, therefore it provided no services: no water, no sewers, no paved roads. Due to government policy at both the federal and local level, therefore, the area and many of its homes were haphazardly constructed, and while former residents remember it fondly as a tightknit community of 2,000 families, officials considered it an eyesore in an increasingly affluent city (Brown 2015; Fonseca 2023; Singh 2023).

In the 1950s, the federal government loosened rules on Indian owned land, finally allowing for 99 year leases in 1959. This opened Section 14 for development, however, federal policy also called for “guardians” and “conservators” to be assigned to the tribes, ostensibly to protect them from being cheated in land deals (Brown 2015). In Palm Springs, local lawyers, real estate agents, the chief of police, and the city’s mayor, Frank Bogert, were appointed to these positions; they often profited by overcharging the Tribe for their services, sometimes double-billing, and occasionally selling off property without tribal consent (Holland 2023).

From the late 1950s through the mid-1960s as Palm Springs grew, the city sought to evict the residents of Section 14 for sale to developers. If residents wouldn’t leave, the city forced them out, often burning and bulldozing their homes (Singh 2023). A 1968 investigation by the State of California called this a “city engineered holocaust” (Fonseca 2023). As Black reparations and the story of Bruce’s Beach gained media attention in 2020, the history of Section 14 began to resurface, and in 2021 the City of Palm Springs issued a formal apology to survivors, and removed a statue of Mayor Bogert from in front of city hall (Singh 2023). In 2022, a group of survivors filed a claim against the City, seeking $2B in reparations for the damage done to their families. However, in April 2023 in a 3-2 vote, the Palm Springs City Council voted against hiring a Columbia University group that would have crafted a plan for reparations (Albani-Burgio 2023). Instead, the council voted to have city staff write a new Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking a consultant who would undertake further historical research to confirm the city’s involvement in Section 14 evictions and property destruction.

Conclusion

Returning illegitimately confiscated property and making monetary reparations are among the most complicated and difficult ways in which governments can make amends. However, even doing things like renaming parks and buildings, removing statues that honor bigots and traitors, honoring the spaces that have been site of violence and bloodshed, or making formal apologies have been cause of angst among government officials. Current city leaders in Manhattan Beach, for example, have refused to take the advice of their own task force and apologize to the Bruce family out of fear that the city will be branded racist (Richard, Nguyen, & Pollack 2021; Xia 2021). This further complicates the fact that, while LA County owned and returned Bruce’s Beach to its rightful owners, the city continues to own several of the other properties that were seized under false pretenses from Black families in 1924. Should city leaders work to make amends to those families? If so, how?

These are among the questions that government leaders will increasingly have to face. On the horizon are new issues as well, including the idea of climate reparations to address environmental health disparities (Donoghoe & Perry 2023). For example, Blacks are 75% more likely to live in communities near toxin emitting industries, as well as more likely to live in flood-prone areas, and Native American lands have long been used as sites of waste dumping and heavy metals mining that can have negative health consequences. Climate change has already led to increased incidences of extreme weather: hotter temperatures, drier droughts, and stronger storms, which disproportionately impact poor and minority communities. The low-income are less able to cool their homes in extreme heat, warm them during extreme cold, or afford the property and health insurance that can help them recover from floods, fires, and disease caused by environmental threats.

How to mitigate these harms, ensure the health and safety of communities, and reduce the racial disparities in exposure to environmental hazards, are issues that must be addressed by government. Importantly, both elected officials and public administrators who are hired for their training and expertise increasingly face demands to consider social equity when making decisions such as where to locate trash facilities and highways. As one scholar has noted, “the pendulum swings in both directions: government was a powerful historical force in building social inequity and can also be a powerful force in eliminating it” (Gooden 2017, p. 824).

Questions to Consider

History is replete with examples of government behaving badly. In the case of Bruce’s Beach, returning the property was possible because it was owned by a public entity with a willingness to make amends. Would this case have been different if the property had been sold to a private developer in the 1950s, and now was the site of beachfront homes? In what ways? If it had been private property, could the family be compensated? If so, how?

Read again the words on Manhattan Beach’s plaque (pg 6) and the statement from Los Angeles County about Bruce’s Beach (pg 7), and compare the two. In what ways are they similar and in what ways do they differ? Who is the audience for public statements like these, and does the audience matter in how they are written?

The razing of Palm Springs’ Section 14 occurred sixty years ago, so most of the survivors were children at the time. What, if anything, are they owed by the city? And what about the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, who may have been cheated by their federally appointed conservators?

The concept of the “sundown town” is an example of racist exclusion exercised by local governments across the country during the Jim Crow era and beyond. In sundown towns, Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC), were typically allowed to work or shop in town during the day, but knew that they could face violence if they stayed after sundown. The City of Minden, Nevada was one such town. Around 1910, the city marked a county-wide racist curfew with a siren warning BIPOC to leave town before dark (DeHaven 2021). While the curfew no longer exists, a siren still blares, now at 5pm. In May 2022, Washoe tribal leaders gathered to protest the city’s continued use of the siren “historically used to order people of color out of town after dark” (Reno Gazette Journal 2022, n.p.). City leaders say the siren now honors first responders, and should no longer be considered part of a racist history. If you were advising city leaders, what factors would you suggest they consider as they face continued protest against the siren? Is there a way for the city to make amends in this situation?

Podcasts and Videos

Chief Executive Officer, Los Angeles County. Returning Bruce’s Beach: A 100-Year Journey to Justice. (21 minute video)

Muhammad Kenyatta, Vice-chairman of the Black Economic Development Conference. The Black Manifesto (interview). (1969) (7 minute interview)

Sarah McCammon. The Story Behind '40 Acres and a Mule.' Code Switch. (January 12, 2015) (3 minute listen)

Juana Summers. The Push for a bill that would drive research into reparations for Black America. National Public Radio. (February 2, 2023) (8 minute listen)

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NOTES

[1]To learn more about the way in which those unjustly incarcerated by Executive Order 9066 are being memorialized by the Irei National Monument Project: https://ireizo.com/

[2] The records are clear that Willa Bruce was the property buyer (for $1,225), a rarity for a woman in 1912.

[3] Eminent domain allows government to take private property for public uses with compensation to the original owners.

[4] For more, see Ned Blackhawk’s The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023), by Yale University Press.