The criminal displacement of Black landowning families was openly rationalized by white officials.

Evidence

The Bruces were broke and spiritually depleted from the fight. In an interview, one of the family’s descendants, Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, explained that “having spent their final pennies fighting eviction, the Bruces left California destitute the same year. Willa suffered a nervous breakdown and died in 1935, and Charles passed away two years later.” Shepard obviously believed that what happened to his ancestors was more than unfair. You know who agreed with him? A member of the Manhattan Beach Board of Trustees, the same board that was responsible for the legal theft of the Bruces’ land. Board member Frank Daugherty wrote in 1945 that “it was a mean trick to make them leave their homes, but it was the only way out.” Daugherty described how “white residents believed ‘the Negro problem was going to stop our progress.’ ” No consideration was given to what taking their land would do to Willa and Charles Bruce. This was opportunity hoarding on steroids. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 348