Seasons LOST, Joy REGAINED

In 1927, a Black seaside resort was STOLEN from its owners by the city of Manhattan Beach. Nearly 100 years later, it's been RETURNED to the family but, as IMANI PERRY writes, what was TAKEN can never be REPLACED.

- IMANI PERRY

In Wallace Thurman’s classic 1929 Harlem Renaissance novel, The Blacker the Berry, the protagonist Emma Lou arrives inLos Angeles to attend college at the University of Southern California. Having grown up in Idaho, she is eager to find a social world in which she will not be the only Black young woman. Among her delights is visiting Bruce’s Beach. She is thrilled: The Pacific Ocean itself did not cause her heartbeat to quicken, nor did the roaring of its waves find an emotional echo within her. But on coming upon Bruce’s Beach for colored people near Redondo... the Pacific Ocean became an intriguing something to contemplate...”

Bruce's Beach was a popular Black-owned resort in Manhattan Beach, near Los Angeles. Thurman, a Utah native, understood its significance for Black people on the West Coast. It was a sanctum, most comparable to Oak Bluffs, Cape May, and Sag Harbor on the East Coast, Idlewild in the Midwest, and Amelia Island in Florida—and its legacy is as complicated as it is glorious.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, exploiting Black labor and refusing the fullness of Black humanity were standard American practices. Black Angelenos, largely migrants from the South, were generally prevented from going to local beaches due to segregation and Jim Crow laws. When they did, they faced harassment, arrest, and assault. Black leisure, the kind afforded by Bruce’s Beach, was therefore not only a way to experience some relaxation, it was also a place for escape, for joy. That joy was a form of resistance.