The bronze plaque at Bruce’s Beach Park, which was installed on its concrete base in early 2023 after years of wrangling over how to honestly tell the history of the space’s namesake family, has been stolen — the latest in a string of similar thefts across Los Angeles County and the nation.
The plaque was stolen on Monday, Jan. 29, Manhattan Beach police said. No other information was available as of Tuesday morning.
The plaque, 2600 Highland Avenue, became a flashpoint for years as Manhattan Beach officials grappled with its wording, seeking to set the record straight about the racial discrimation that entrepeneurs Willa and Charles Bruce, who were Black, faced in the 1920s and the role city officials at the time played in it.
The Bruce family owned the first seaside resort for Black people in the early 20th century. But the land — directly on the shoreline just blocks west of Bruce’s Beach Park — was seized by early city leaders using emminet domain for reasons, according to the historical record, that were racially motivated. Other families in the area also had their land taken.
The story of the Bruce family surfaced in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police and during a Juneteenth celebration at Bruce’s Beach Park.
What followed was a yearslong process by county and state officials to return the seaside land to the heirs of the original owners. That process wrapped in July 2022, when the descendants received the deed to the land, though in January 2023, the family announced they would sell the land back to Los Angeles County.
At the same time that process was unfolding, Manhattan Beach was working on ways to tell that history accurately, including by installing a new plaque with more robust language at the city-owned Bruce’s Beach Park.
The original plaque focused mostly on early, White developer George Peck’s role in allowing Black people to buy beachfront land in Manhattan Beach.
But after multiple…
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