The recent reparations legislation and public discussion concerning the fate of Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach, California, makes Black California Dreamin’, an exhibition at the California African American Museum, relevant to the political and cultural moment. Bruce’s Beach, a leisure site developed by an African American family in 1912 but confiscated by the city in 1924, was returned to the family’s descendants in 2022 as part of a tentative legislative move toward restitution for racial discrimination in California. The state bought the property from the family in 2023, but the “discovery” of Bruce’s Beach is part of a larger project of cultural archaeology revealing hidden histories of African American space-claiming on “America’s Leisure Frontier.”
Throughout the exhibition, visitors learn of Black leisure spaces that vary considerably in type—beaches, a country club, a dude ranch. The fates of these have too much in common. In story after story, place after place,...
University of California Press