The new plaque for Bruce’s Beach Park will at last be set in stone — in just a couple of weeks.
Manhattan Beach will unveil the new monument immortalizing two Black entrepreneurs from Manhattan Beach’s early days during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 25, the city announced recently. The city is currently installing the plaque’s foundation and will finish putting the entire thing in by the reveal.
Mayor Steve Napolitano and yet-to-be-determined guest speakers will give remarks at the event.
“It is important that we remember and honor the history behind the area we now call Bruce’s Beach Park,” Napolitano said in a Friday, Feb. 10, press release. “While we cannot change what happened nearly 100 years ago, neither should we run from it. We have taken great strides to better understand that difficult chapter in our history and embrace the lessons we can learn from it.”
The City Council last month picked the ultimate design and directed staff to begin installing the plaque. It has taken nearly three years to get here.
A task force initially charged with planning the plaque redo in 2020 was turned into a history advisory board that was then set to rewrite the plaque’s language in 2021. But the City Council ended up taking over that job last year.
Then projected installation dates kept getting pushed back, from last Juneteenth to December, targets the city also missed.
But the original plaque was finally removed in November.
The national reckoning on systemic racism that exploded in 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, became particularly local in Manhattan Beach after a Juneteenth celebration, organized by activist Kavon Ward, brought to light the history of Bruce’s Beach and the surrounding area.
During the 1920s, the city used eminent domain to take away land from Willa and Charles Bruce, who were Black and operated a seaside resort for African Americans. The city used eminent domain to…
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