Manhattan Beach City Council rejects apology regarding Bruce’s Beach
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by Mark McDermott
Nearly three hours of public testimony had already occurred at Tuesday night’s Manhattan Beach City Council meeting before councilmembers took up the question of whether or not to issue an apology to the Bruce family and other Black families displaced by the City from their beachfront homes a century ago.
Several more hours of testimony had been taken at the March 23 council meeting. For months, the issue had embroiled the community and captured national attention. In-depth stories on Bruce’s Beach were published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times regarding the council’s attempts to address the racially-motivated misdeed that the city perpetrated in 1924, when the city utilized the eminent domain to wrest away land from the burgeoning Black community at Bruce’s Beach resort. An anonymous group called Concerned Residents of MB had run full-page advertisements arguing against an apology and sent out group emails that suggested the racial history of the incident had been overblown as an attempt by “the woke mob” to grab power.