May we remain forever
faithful to our God,
faithful to our homeland.
Manhattan Beach Mayor Steve Napolitano waited behind a microphone as the final stanza of “The Black National Anthem” floated over the grassy slope of Bruce’s Beach Park, toward the multimillion-dollar homes that line the Strand, and finally over the the deep blue of the Pacific. Ocean.
“I feel like a race car driver,” the white man confessed to the mostly white crowd gathered at a place that had been a haven for black beach goers before it was robbed by the city of Manhattan Beach through a racist act of eminent domain.
“Do you know how it feels?” Napolitano continued. “Everyone is waiting to see if you crash and burn.”
Nor did it on Saturday morning. A long-planned ceremony to dedicate a new plaque, one that outlines the many injustices committed against Willa and Charles Bruce and several other black families who, a century ago, owned and ran businesses on the beachfront land It turned out surprisingly well.
The mayor even did what the rest of the Manhattan Beach City Council has stubbornly refused to do. He said he’s sorry.
“I have heard all the excuses,” he said. “ ‘The families were compensated. It was a long time ago. An apology is an admission of guilt and an apology will mean judgments.’ Nonsense. All of them. I can apologize on my own, and right now I do.”
But, to extend the Napolitano race car analogy a bit further, getting to this place that feels like a finish line in the decades-long saga over Bruce’s Beach has been a bumpy ride. And yes, the city has crashed and burned more than a few times.
The story of what happened to the Bruces and the other black families has always been known in Manhattan Beach, but rarely talked about, like an open secret. Even when historians pointed out facts over the years, residents and elected officials ignored them. They wanted to forget the past and their city’s contribution to the American practice of terrorizing black people and depriving us of generational wealth.
Napolitano takes a photo of the words on the new license plate.
(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)
It was only because of a group of irrepressible black activists and the urgency of pandemic-era racial reckoning that forced Bruce’s Beach to permanently engage in public dialogue.
Tellingly, then, those black activists were nowhere to be found on Saturday. Ditto for black elected officials who have attended previous ceremonies at Bruce’s Beach, including one in which Gov. Gavin Newsom symbolically handed over ownership of the waterfront property to members of the Bruce family. Not even the city’s first and only black mayor, Mitch Ward, attended.
And vice versa, many of the white elected officials who were there on Saturday refused to attend those earlier ceremonies.
“The history of Bruce’s Beach,” Napolitano said at one point, drawing assents from the many white members of the Manhattan Beach City Council, “runs parallel to the history of racism in America at the turn of the last century.”
And in fact it does.
But what Napolitano seemed unwilling to consider is that the Manhattan Beach story parallels the history of racism in America in this century. It is the story of how whites, used to being in power and being able to decide what history should matter to the rest of us, are forced to confront a changing country.
Known for being in the “bubble” of the South Bay, this city has long been overwhelmingly white and wealthy, even as the rest of Los Angeles County has become increasingly diverse and impoverished.
Nationally, these kinds of demographic shifts have created the perfect conditions for the ugliness of white grievance politics. Locally, it manifests more as the kind of sluggishness, whining, and general reluctance to change that we’ve seen in Manhattan Beach.
Ward has lived through this. Not long after becoming mayor in 2006, he took up the cause of Bruce’s Beach.
Knowing the history that so many others had refused to acknowledge, he wanted to rename the park where Napolitano spoke Saturday after the Bruce family. Why not, he thought, celebrate the first black entrepreneurs and residents in Manhattan Beach? As a black man, he saw them, and still sees them, as local heroes.
Not all agreed.
“The dialogue was tough and difficult,” Ward told me. “There were people who were strongly opposed, including people who were on the City Council, to the name change and I was stunned. There were friends in the audience who were saying things that I was surprised they would say.”
Ironically, it was then-councilmember Joyce Karlin Fahey, who in a previous life was the judge who paroled Korean shopkeeper Soon Ja Du for the murder of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins, which helped spark the Los Angeles riots. in 1992, who gave Ward the votes he needed for Bruce’s Beach Park.
Manhattan Beach changed then, albeit reluctantly.
“It made me feel even better about my city,” Ward told me. “Because there was a black man leading the city and we prevailed. We got the name of a park in our city renowned for a black family.”
The plaque that was installed there when Ward was mayor was replaced before Saturday’s ceremony. The language it contains is new: different, more whitewashed, and politically acceptable, according to some historians. That’s why he didn’t attend.
“I want to honor Willa and Charles, but not that plaque,” Ward told me.
Benjamin Leggett, 8, helps Napolitano cut a ribbon for the unveiling of the new plaque.
(Jay L. Clendenin/Los Angeles Times)
Napolitano dismissed the criticism, just as he dismissed criticism that Manhattan Beach is a racist city and council members are “white saviors.” On the contrary, he insisted. The city had “crude discussions about past and present racist incidents” and elected officials submitting to “the slings and arrows of public scrutiny.”
“It goes to show that we are never going to please some people,” he said, “some of whom stood on this very spot 16 years ago to celebrate nothing more than the name change of this park.”
It’s funny how Napolitano and the others who spoke at Saturday’s ceremony failed to mention the black activists who forced the city into such “raw discussions” in the first place, instead thanking the late Manhattan Beach historian Bob Brigham for it is white.
May we remain forever, faithful to our God, faithful to our homeland.
“We are here today to unveil a new plan to reconcile our history, confront some uncomfortable truths and acknowledge how far we have come while acknowledging how far we still have to go,” Napolitano said, her words floating over the grassy hillside. from Bruce’s Beach Park, towards the multi-million dollar houses that adjoin the Strand. “We’re not here to check a box (or) pat each other on the back.”
