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The California State Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a landmark bill that would allow Los Angeles County to return beachfront land seized from former black owners Willa and Charles Bruce in the 1920s to their descendants, according to reports.
The bill then makes its way to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office and although his office has not indicated whether he will sign it, the bill is very popular, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.
If signed, it would be the first law to return land to former black owners to redress past discriminatory policies.
The effort began last summer during the anti-racism protest movement and after a petition was circulated calling for reparations on the beach, the Daily News reported.
The bill “represents economic and historic justice,” State Senator Steven Bradford told The Daily News, “and is a model of what reparations can really look like.”
The California State Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a landmark bill that would allow Los Angeles County to return beachfront land seized from former black owners Willa and Charles Bruce in the 1920s to their descendants, according to reports.
The California State Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a landmark bill that would allow Los Angeles County to return beachfront land seized from former black owners Willa and Charles Bruce in the 1920s to their descendants, according to reports.
(Photo by APU GOMES / AFP via Getty Images)
The Bruces bought the two plots of land in Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County in 1912 and managed a complex that accommodated black people.
The Bruses and other black families were harassed by racist white neighbors, and in 1924 the city condemned black-owned lots and seized them across a prominent estate to create a park – now Bruce’s Beach Park.
The couple sued for racial discrimination and were ultimately awarded $ 14,500 but never reclaimed their land, according to the Los Angeles Times.
In 1948 Manhattan Beach ceded the Bruce lands to the state and in 1995 the state ceded them to Los Angeles County, which is not legally allowed to return it to the Bruces, according to the Daily News. The bill would change that.
“I am delighted to be walking on the water right now,” Duane Shepard, a distant descendant of the Bruce, said Thursday. “It’s one of the greatest things in American history right now.”
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“This is going to be the start of something really important for our people now,” he added, reported the Daily News.
“This is the first time that a government has done something like this and there were a lot of questions about how it would work,” Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn said last summer, of the complications related to the valuation of land, to the determination of heirs. , relocating the current lifeguard station and other issues.
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