A century elapsed before California returned property stolen from a black family

Evidence

The recent example of Bruce’s Beach in the movement for acknowledging black loss and taking action also hails from California. Although most black Americans have never been compensated for the discriminatory and racist policies that allowed their property to be stolen from them, the descendants of at least one family have. It took one hundred years before the State of California righted the wrong done to the Bruces—a state where only 6.5 percent of the population is black. Bruce’s Beach demonstrates how the law was used to exclude black Americans from Manhattan Beach, California—a legacy that remains today with the city’s less-than-one-percent black population. California also created a Reparations Task Force and issued a one-thousand-page-plus report with recommendations. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 599

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete example supporting the reparations-as-accounting argument — direct evidence for the ‘hidden history’ leg of Brown’s three-part architecture. — connects to: Confirming Mexican-era land titles in California took seventeen years on average — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2488
• SHARE: Send to anyone working on CA reparations policy — the Bruce’s Beach case is their precedent.