Barbara and I drove down to the South Bay this morning for a February ocean/beach fix and a nod to Black History Month. Like most beach areas in SoCal, the modern history of Manhattan Beach began with a railroad line, this one on the way to Redondo Beach. In 1901 John Merrill & company bought the property for a resort town called Potencia Beach then renamed Manhattan (allegedly after an exclusive beach hotel-resort in Coney Island). The small beach city of Manhattan ("Beach" was added later) was incorporated in 1912, the same year Willa Bruce paid $1,225 for her first lot toward the north end of the young city's beach after being refused land in other parts of the county. Willa and her husband opened "Bruce's Lodge," a portable beach cottage welcoming black beachgoers with refreshments, bathing suits, and a changing area, then replaced it in 1916 with a 2-story resort with a dance hall and restaurant. By 1920, Willa had bought another lot, the total population of Manhattan had grown to 859, and the old 1890s power company pier was replaced with a brand new pier, The Bruce's success drew other blacks to purchase lots near the resort, and for years Bruce's Beach thrived as a black, sand-and-surf playground. SoCal in the 1920s was a liminal period—autos, resort towns, movies, and surfing on the upside; Jim Crow and a rebirth of the KKK on the downside. Discrimination, harassment, and intimidation of the Bruces' resort began immediately. In 1924, a racially motivated petition by local white real estate agents and citizens convinced the City Council to use eminent domain to condemn the Bruce resort and surrounding area under the pretext of needing the land for a park. Although the NAACP staged its first peaceful "swim-in" protest against the decision in 1927, the Bruces and other black land owners lost every court battle and were forced off their land. Their lots stood empty for decades—the park didn't appear until 32 guilty years later. In 2020, one hundred years after the heyday of "Bruce's Beach," advocate Kavon Ward began a movement toward justice for the Bruces. With the support of local and state politicians, Janice Hahn, the governor, and State Senator Steven Bradford, the condemned area was dedicated and renamed Bruce's Beach in 2007, the land was returned to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce in 2021, and, in 2023, the family sold the land back to the county—by choice. Barbara and I hiked the area behind all of that history today. We started at the pier, now a California State Historical Landmark, with its circular Roundhouse Aquarium at the end and bordered with tons of surfers and lines of beach volleyball nets. From the pier we walked north on the Strand, tucked between the oceanside bike path and multi-million $$ "beach houses" (Manhattan Beach has more houses valued over $1M than any city in California.) At 26th, we stopped at the LA County Lifeguard Administration Building on the original Bruce's Beach site to read the plaque detailing the history, then headed east to visit Bruce's Park (the lots confiscated) at Highland. Note: we altered the AllTrails route to include Highland so we could get in a bit of beach-house-dreaming and shop-window-shopping. Highland took us back to Manhattan Beach Boulevard and the pier. Despite past wrongs now corrected, today Manhattan Beach is a charm of a beach city to take an oceanside hike.