Return Of Willa And Charles Bruce’s Manhattan Beach Property Paves Way For Reparations For Other African Americans

Los Angeles officials have announced an effort to return the valuable Manhattan Beach property to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce. Now Their Family Could Get It Back. Return Of Willa And Charles Bruce’s Manhattan Beach Property Pave’s Way For Reparations For Other African Americans

Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard Is A Relative Of The Bruce Family.

On a recent morning, Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, 69, sat on a grassy hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, steps away from one of southern California’s most pristine beaches.

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To visitors from around the world, it’s an idyllic stretch of coastline and a prime surfing spot. To Shepard, it’s the site that conceals a painful history.

His family’s ancestors – Willa and Charles Bruce – bought the land at the bottom of the hill in 1912 and built a resort run for and by Black residents. Despite harassment and violence from white neighbors and the Ku Klux Klan, the couple’s enterprise endured, providing rare California beach access for African Americans.

Then, in 1924, city officials condemned the neighborhood and moved to seize the property. The local council said it needed the plot for a park, but instead left it vacant for decades.

“They were terrorized and left destitute,” said Shepard, as joggers ran along the beach in front of him and surfers made their way to the water. “We want back what belongs to us.”

Charles And Willa Bruce

There’s now a concerted effort to make that transfer a reality, nearly 100 years after the seizure. Last week, LA county officials announced an unprecedented legislative push to return the valuable property to the descendants of Willa and Charles, which would grant them the wealth they have been denied for generations.

“This is a reckoning that has been long overdue,” Anthony Bruce, a 38-year-old great-great-grandson said in a phone interview this week from Florida, where he lives. “For me and the generations after, this would mean an inheritance – and that internal security of knowing that I come from somewhere, that I come from a people.”

But in Manhattan Beach, which is less than 1% Black today, righting these historical wrongs is proving to be an uphill battle.

‘They Covered Up This History’

Willa Bruce bought their first plot of land by the ocean for $1,225. The LA Times reported in 1912 on the “great agitation” and “opposition” of white property owners, saying she “created a storm … by establishing a seaside resort for her race”.

Willa told the paper: “Wherever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort, we have been refused, but I own this land and I am going to keep it.”

A Los Angeles Times Article From 27 June 1912 About Bruce’s Beach.

 

The area, which became known as Bruce’s Beach among African Americans, was one of a number of Black leisure spots that were formed in the region at that time.

“African Americans were establishing themselves, because they wanted to enjoy southern California’s offerings,” said Dr Alison Rose Jefferson, a historian and the author of Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era. “Having a place by the beach is a quintessential part of what the California dream is.”

But hate crimes and threats escalated against the Bruces. The KKK started a fire under a main deck, and Black visitors were forced to walk half a mile to reach the beach due to roadblocks set up at the adjacent property of George Peck, a wealthy landowner and developer, according to the LA Times.

In 1924, the city, which by then was called Manhattan Beach, condemned the Bruces’ land and other adjacent homes owned by Black residents, using eminent domain, with the stated goal of building a park.

After years of litigation, the Bruces, who had sought $120,000, were given $14,000. And while a judge said they had the right to move back to Manhattan Beach, they couldn’t afford anything after they had lost their wealth and feared the KKK if they returned, said Shepard.

“They were poor and totally devastated,” said Shepard, noting that they moved to the east side of LA and spent the rest of their lives working as cooks in other people’s diners. Willa died five years later.

“Learning that a hate crime was committed against my family, it was jarring,” said Anthony Bruce, recalling his first visit to the site of their stolen land in the 80s when he was five. “It felt personal, like it was an attack against me.”

Today, the Bruces’ property is worth millions.

Anthony’s grandfather, Bernard Bruce, the grandson of Willa and Charles, grew up distraught about this history: “He was obsessed about it, because he knew how much it was worth. He was trying to get that land back for almost his entire life,” Anthony said.

Sweethearts Margie Johnson And John Pettigrew At The Crowded Pacific Ocean Shoreline. Photograph: Photograph From The Private Lavera White Collection Of Arthur And Elizabeth Lewis Featured In Living The California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During The Jim Crow Era, 2020

 

Bernard made progress in 2006 when, with help from the city’s first Black councilman, officials renamed a nearby park Bruce’s Beach and put up a plaque honoring Willa and Charles.

But the plaque excludes any mention of the KKK and harassment, and presents George Peck, considered a co-founder of Manhattan Beach, as a benevolent neighbor, who “made it possible” for the Bruces to run a beach for Black residents.

“George Peck was not the white savior of the Black people to allow this community to begin,” said Jefferson. “It misrepresents what happened.”

Standing by the plaque, Shepard said: “It doesn’t belong here with those lies on it.” He noted that the Bruces should be considered founders of Manhattan Beach just as much as Peck, adding, “Manhattan Beach covered up this history for 80 years. This was by design.”

The uprisings after the killing of George Floyd last year gave the Bruces and their supporters new momentum. But the progress is coming too late for Bernard, who died of Covid-19 in January at age 86.

‘So many generations were wronged’

The park now known as Bruce’s Beach is located on a hill just above the land that once housed the family’s resort. That property is now a bland building owned by LA county and used as a lifeguard training headquarters.

Last Friday, LA and state legislators stood outside it to unveil a new state bill that would remove restrictions on the property and allow the county to return it to the Bruces.

“I was born and raised in Los Angeles, and I’m embarrassed, to be honest, that I did not know this story until last year,” Janice Hahn, the LA county supervisor leading the legislative effort, told the Guardian. “I grew up learning to swim in the ocean a few blocks from what was Bruce’s Beach … So when I finally heard this story, I felt there was nothing else I could do but figure out how to return this property.”

One possible plan is to give ownership of the property back to the family, who could then lease it back to the county, said Shepard, who is a cousin of the direct descendants.

The impact of the loss of generational wealth is difficult to calculate, but Shepard said the majority of Bruces today live under the poverty line, noting a great-great-grandson who can’t afford to own a car and still walks to work: “It’s hit them very hard – there are student loans they could have paid off, there are mortgages they might not even have had. They would have been multimillionaires.”

“All of these generations have been wronged,” said Anthony. “This will affect my children and their children’s children … And I want them to know that they can receive justice from their government.”

If successful, Hahn said she hoped it would be a model for returning land, including for Japanese Americans whose property was taken during the second world war, and Native Americans.

There are thousands of Black families who have suffered like the Bruces, Jefferson noted, including farmers pushed off of their land and homeowners whose neighborhoods were seized for freeways.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Shepard, who is also indigenous and a chief of the Pocasset Wampanoag tribe of the Pokanoket Nation.

‘Black people are still unwelcome’

While LA county and state leaders are pushing ahead, not all in the region have been supportive.

Last week, the Manhattan Beach city council, the same entity that took their land a century ago, voted to oppose a symbolic proclamation to apologize to the Bruces, citing concerns it would make the city liable for future lawsuits.

Meanwhile, an anonymous group of residents has run full-page ads in a local paper arguing that a “woke mob” had exaggerated the history of racism at Bruce’s Beach and urging the council not to apologize.

It’s all been a reminder, advocates say, of how racism has persisted in this waterfront community.

“That says they don’t even regard Black people as people,” said Kavon Ward, a Black resident of Manhattan Beach who last year founded a group called Justice for Bruce’s Beach to advocate for the land to be returned. She said she had experienced racism since moving to the city four years ago, including being asked by a white resident which family she was nannying for.

“I’ve heard so many stories of Black people who grew up here and are still scarred. They say they will never step foot again here, because they feel they are not welcome, especially the closer you get to the water.”

“I’ve heard so many stories of Black people who grew up here and are still scarred”

Kavon Ward

Black surfers have also spoken about racism at Manhattan Beach, where they say white surfers have harassed them and called them racist slurs.

On a recent morning, Tagus Ashford stopped by the plaque to take a photo after learning about Bruce’s Beach in the news. The Black Oklahoma City resident, who was in town visiting family, said he was not surprised to learn of the pushback.

“People get uncomfortable when people start to claim what is theirs, especially when it was stolen or ill-gotten. But it’s important for people to claim their ancestral rights,” he said, adding that the ongoing racial tensions in Manhattan Beach were palpable to him as soon as he arrived: “You can feel it in the air.”

Shepard said he was appalled by the city’s refusal to even say sorry and that his family would be pushing for restitution and damages from Manhattan Beach, beyond getting the property back from the county.

“We’re still suffering for what their ancestors did. Somebody needs to rectify this injustice,” he said. “They’re still benefiting from the generational wealth of their ancestors while we don’t have a dime coming in.”

Updated: 5-22-2021

Manhattan Beach May Show The Way On Reparations

Almost a century after authorities seized a Black-owned resort in Southern California, descendants may get the property back.

It’s difficult to say how all this will end. But on a beach in Southern California, you can see how a process of reparations might begin for descendants of slaves and other Black Americans harmed by centuries of state-sanctioned racism.

Officials in California are debating compensation for descendants of a Black couple who operated a small resort for Black vacationers in Manhattan Beach until the town seized their property in the 1920s.

Willa Bruce had purchased a seaside lot in Manhattan Beach in 1912 and was soon advertising a beach club for Black guests.

While her husband, Charles, worked as a dining-car chef for the railroad, Mrs. Bruce built a successful business by the sea.

“Wherever we have tried to buy land for a beach resort we have been refused,” Bruce told the Los Angeles Times in 1912, “but I own this land and I am going to keep it.”

In the 1920s, a “speculative fever descended onto America’s shores” as entrepreneurs sought to transform sand and sea into fortunes, writes Andrew W. Kahrl in “The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South.”

From the Chesapeake to the Gulf Coast and on to the Pacific, Black entrepreneurs tried to join the fray, developing resort property where Blacks could enjoy a respite from the daily degradations of Jim Crow. Time and again, they were driven off by arson, legal subterfuge or persistent harassment.

Guests at Bruce Beach were similarly harassed. A “No Trespassing” sign was erected by a White property owner, forcing guests to walk half a mile to get to a beach that was directly in front of them.

A remarkable graduate thesis, written in 1956 by Robert Brigham, a Manhattan Beach resident, recounts the history.

“Coloreds frequently returned from the beach to find that the air had been let out of their automobile tires, according to one report,” says Brigham’s thesis, for which he received a master’s degree in social sciences from Fresno State. “Another indicated that one house was burned and another attempted burned in the early 1920s.”

Still, the guests kept coming, and a handful of other Black investors joined Bruce as property owners. “Since most of the Negroes using the beach were not the inhabitants of the few Negro-owned cottages but rather casual visitors who used the Bruce facilities, it becomes more evident that Bruce’s Lodge probably accelerated the move on the part of Manhattan whites to oust the Negroes, including those who owned cottages,” wrote Brigham, who died in 2019.

An interim report released last week by a City of Manhattan Beach task force confirms Brigham’s suspicions. As early as 1915 — just a few years after Bruce bought her lot — the city clerk was already complaining that it was a drag on neighboring property values. (The report includes a lengthy quote from him, complete with crude language that has only grown more offensive in the century since.)

In 1924, the city filed a lawsuit pursuing condemnation of 30 lots. “Five of these were owned by African American families, including their cottages and the Bruces’ lodge,” the task force report notes.

While Bruce and other Black property owners fought the effort to remove them, they eventually lost in court.

The Bruces were compensated $14,500 for their property. Manhattan Beach is gilded real estate now; a recent report by Zillow puts a “typical” home there at $2.64 million. Beachfront costs millions more.

Remarkably, a century later, the Bruce land remains in public hands. It features a training center for lifeguards and is owned by Los Angeles County.

With no competing private claims on the property, Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn has said she is open to remedying an “injustice” by returning the land to descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce.

The consistent public control of the property would make reparations easier. But the principle that such a transaction advances — that Black Americans deserve compensation for the wrongs they have suffered — applies more broadly.

There are countless other instances where Black resort property, including beachfront, was transferred to White investors after White authorities and local racists combined to make it all but impossible for Black investors to stay on the land, let alone profit from it. In many other cases, Blacks were prohibited from purchasing or building to begin with.

“African Americans were trying to manage the discrimination they were experiencing,” said Alison Rose Jefferson, author of “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites During the Jim Crow Era,” while at the same time they were “trying to enjoy the offerings of the region.”

Reparations have been moving in a limited, localized way. The U.S. House of Representatives is currently considering legislation, but its prospects are dim. A move toward reparations by Los Angeles County would be a notable step.

If the descendants of the Bruces are owed compensation for their family’s lost paradise, what of other Black Americans whose ancestors were swindled, burned or intimidated out of theirs?

Updated: 7-21-2021

Black Family To Get $75 Million Beach Property Back, California City Used Tricknology To Steal It In 1924

Officials in Los Angeles County have finally decided to return a beach property worth millions to a Black family nearly 100 years after it was grabbed by the government.

In the 1920s, Charles and Willa Bruce owned a beach resort that welcomed Black visitors who were not permitted on the city’s white beaches in Manhattan Beach, now an upscale city near the southern end of Santa Monica Bay. The property became known as Bruce’s Beach.

Now, the descendants of the Bruce family are set to receive the land that could be worth up to $75 million.

The decision came after years of fighting by the Bruce family.

“It was a very important place because there was no other place along the coast of California where African Americans could actually go and enjoy the water,” said Chief Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, the Bruce family historian and spokesperson, in an Insider interview.

Despite intimidation from the Ku Klux Klan and white residents, the Bruce family kept the resort open. But in 1924 the city council used tricknology to grab the land from the couple.

The city cited eminent domain as a reason to take the land under the guise of building a park. However, the land remained untouched for years.

Willa and Charles Bruce fought back legally but received only $14,000 in compensation, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The land is worth approximately $75 million, city officials told CNN.

California State Sen. Steven Bradford is being credited with helping to push through the city council decision to return the land. “Respect to @SteveBradford on pushing CA SB796 for the return of #BrucesBeach to the Bruce Family! Time stamp 51:00 Tulsa and Reparations all came up in this Senate Session June 2nd, 2021” FridayJones @IAMFriday tweeted.

“We are on an important road to set a precedent that could be replicated across the country as we work to put actions behind our commitment to an anti-racist agenda and anti-racist county,” Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors member Holly Mitchell told KTLA. “We cannot achieve racial equity until we confront our past and make it right.”

In 2007, a plaque was placed on the land to acknowledge the Bruces, but it contained “misinformation,” Shepard said. The plaque credits Gregory Peck, a white landowner, and not the Bruces for making “it possible” for the beachfront property to be open to “all people.”

Updated: 1-3-2023

LA Pays $20 Million For Black Couple’s Beach Tract Taken In 1924

‘This is what reparations look like”: Los Angeles County chair.

Los Angeles County is buying a prime Southern California beachfront property that had been forcibly taken from a Black couple a century ago and recently given back to its heirs.

In a ceremony in July, the county returned the deed of Bruce’s Beach, located about 20 miles (32 kilometers) south of the city of Los Angeles, to the descendants of Willa and Charles Bruce, who were stripped of the land by Manhattan Beach city officials in 1924.

Those family members have now decided to sell the property back to the county for almost $20 million.

“This fight has always been about what is best for the Bruce family, and they feel what is best for them is selling this property back to the county for nearly $20 million and finally rebuilding the generational wealth they were denied for nearly a century,” said Janice Hahn, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, in a statement on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for Hahn told Bloomberg News that the Bruce family did not intend to release a statement about the sale.

Bruce’s Beach, which comprised two lots of land with beachfront views in the Southern California enclave of Manhattan Beach, was purchased by the Bruces between 1912 and 1920, where they built a resort welcoming Black beachgoers.

The property and several others owned by at least six other Black landowners were seized by Manhattan Beach authorities in the 1920s, after White residents made racist and hostile complaints.

Following the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, the Manhattan Beach City Council assembled a task force which ultimately acknowledged the harm inflicted on those residents, and recommended that the county return the land to the Bruce family.

The land was leased back to the Bruce family’s descendants, with an option to sell the land back to the county for its market price.

At the time of the agreement, Anthony Bruce said his great-great-grandparents’s loss “destroyed them financially. It destroyed their chance at the American Dream. I wish they could see what has happened today.”

The median price for a house in Manhattan Beach was $2.6 million in November 2022, according to Redfin data. Fewer than 1% of residents in the area are Black, data from the US Census Bureau show.

“This is what reparations look like and it is a model that I hope governments across the country will follow,” said Hahn in Tuesday’s statement.

Updated: 11-15-2023

Los Angeles Returned Land To A Black Family. Was It Reparations?

The lawyer representing the heirs of Willa and Charles Bruce — owners of Bruce’s Beach resort — says current laws fail to provide a remedy for property that was unlawfully seized from Black owners decades ago.

Ever since Los Angeles returned unlawfully seized land to the heirs of Willa and Charles Bruce — the Black owners of the century-old Bruce’s Beach resort — last year, racial justice advocates have been questioning whether this constitutes an act of reparations, and if it’s replicable in other cities and counties.

The lawyer who represented the Bruce family, George C. Fatheree, isn’t completely sure reparations is the correct label. Speaking at a summit in Asheville, North Carolina, last month, Fatheree said that if the return of Bruce’s Beach is indeed reparations, it’s an “inadequate” form because it doesn’t address the tangible and intangible losses suffered by the wider Black community who lost a place of refuge and leisure, as well as economic opportunities.

But he stands by the idea that the Bruce’s Beach case is instructive for unlocking a broader view of how reparations can be realized, by looking at how public institutions can make amends for racist actions that have devastated Black families throughout history.

Fatheree was invited to speak in Asheville as part of a community discussion around how to move forward with reparations for the city’s Black residents. Asheville is one of dozens of local governments exploring ways to define and administer reparations for African Americans who’ve lost property, wealth and livelihoods due to racist policies ranging from slavery to redlining.

What worked for the Bruces in Los Angeles County, though, may not necessarily work for Black families elsewhere, according to Fatheree. He’s had to grapple with that reality since he now fields hundreds of calls and emails from other Black families with situations similar to the Bruces. The Bruce heirs sold the land back to LA County for $20 million in January this year.

While they were able to get more than fair market value, that amount doesn’t account for the revenue that could have been generated by the beach resort property that Willa Bruce ran before the city took the land from her via a fraudulent eminent domain case.

CityLab spoke with Fatheree about the Bruce family’s ordeal, the debate over whether or not it constitutes reparations, and why it matters whether it is or not. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You had a willing political partner in LA County board commissioner Janice Hahn in helping make this transfer possible. Do you think this would have been possible without an ally on board, with a hostile or even indifferent board of commissioners?

The political leadership here was the indispensable ingredient resulting in the successful return of the Bruce’s Beach property to the Bruce family. The problem is, even with overwhelming evidence making it crystal clear that the eminent domain was entirely racially motivated, our laws failed to provide an adequate remedy.

The issue they face is that either it was legal at the time it was done, and so there’s no opportunity for redress, or even if it was illegal at the time, it happened so long ago that our current legal system does not provide any remedy. So that’s when we need political leadership.

And that’s exactly what we had in Los Angeles County with Janice Hahn and her colleague Holly Mitchell who stepped up and said, ‘You know, look, what’s right is right.’

Do you think there is a responsibility for every unit of government to do a kind of land audit, to see where property was unfairly taken from people of color?

I absolutely do. If you look at the history of Black dispossession of land—erecting barriers that would not allow Black people to buy property, live in healthy communities, build wealth based on property ownership, and transferring that wealth on an intergenerational basis—if you look at our history, every level of government has not just participated, but led the efforts.

And the reason that these stories are important is because, unfortunately, we’ve still got folks today who are okay with the benefits and advantages of inheritance. But they don’t want to take any responsibility or accountability for the burdens of inheritance.

You seemed hesitant in Asheville to refer to the Bruce’s Beach case as reparations. Why is that?

I’m trained as an attorney. I try to have precision in my use of language. So if you think historically about what reparations was supposed to be, it was right after the Civil War, the money that the federal government was supposed to pay Black people—or really it was the land that they were supposed to give to Black people as compensation for 400 years of chattel slavery.

Bruce’s Beach was not that. This was a property that never should have been taken from this family in the first place. And the right thing to do was to give it back. Nothing to do with reparations, nothing to do with the legacy of slavery.

In the broader sense, an understanding of reparations is repairing for harm that was done. I think that you could fit the return of the Bruce’s beach property to the Bruce family under that expansive definition.

But I want to be clear that starting in the late 1800s up until today, there is not one model that the private sector and the government have used to deprive Black people of the right to own property and create wealth. There’s been dozens of models: racial zoning, racially restrictive covenants, redlining, urban renewal, and racially motivated eminent domain.

There are racial discrepancies in tax assessments and in the appraisal process. There’s the peddling of subprime mortgages toward Black and brown borrowers and consumers. So there’s dozens of strategies that have been used, so I don’t talk about a model. We need models, plural.

What do you think of arguments that say localized efforts like these aren’t a model for reparations at all, that they may even be a distraction from broader reparations efforts?

On the one hand, I agree. This is not what reparations looks like. This idea that all we need to do is go back and find in time a specific wrong where someone lost their property, and now all we need to do is trace forward through the family tree and determine their legal errors, and then return that property to them—that’s too narrow-minded.

When the Bruces lost their property 100 years ago, it wasn’t just the Bruce family that was harmed. It was that Black community. It was the people who worked at the resort who lost their jobs. It was Black families who vacationed there.

What was lost was generations of opportunity to build community and build wealth. I don’t think it’s a distraction. I think there’s symbolic importance. I also think there’s an actual importance in terms of impacting the lives of these individuals. But it’s far from sufficient.

It’s a model, but it’s an inadequate one. Honest reparations need to repair, provide compensation and take into account not just the people who we can specifically say lost this piece of land at this address, but also countless African American families and communities who lost opportunities.

What are some examples of other places you learned about while working on this case, where local government took land from Black families under such blatantly racist circumstances?

Once my involvement in the Bruce’s Beach case became public, I started getting a phone call or an email every day from Black families across the country telling me their stories about their family’s land loss. It wasn’t just eminent domain. There were cases of fraud and violence and intimidation.

I started doing my own research, and I learned about places like Overtown, in Miami, which used to be called Colored Town. This was a thriving Black community. It was the Harlem of the South. There were theaters, restaurants and businesses. But then in the 1960s, Florida Department of Transportation decided to put the 95 freeway straight through Overtown, bisecting their city.

Then a few years later, they put in the 395 Dolphin Expressway and then the population of that neighborhood went from 50,000 predominantly African Americans to 8,000. The businesses were destroyed, and the communities were destroyed.

Then there’s Section 14 in Palm Springs, California, in the ‘50s. This was when Hollywood celebrities were going out to Palm Springs buying fancy homes and golf courses and resorts. So they needed Black folks to work at the hotels and to be waiters, busboys, chauffeurs and house cleaners.

So there was this area in the middle of downtown Palm Springs called Section 14 where all the working class folks lived. It was land that was part of a tribal reservation.

Back then, there was a law or regulation that limited the term of land lease you could have, capped at 12 months. With that, nobody was going to really develop on the land because you weren’t sure if you were going to have it more than a year. So Section 14 kind of developed as a shantytown, if you will. But Congress changed that law to permit leases of up to 99 years.

The city realized that this Section 14 could be a valuable asset if they developed it with million-dollar homes and hotels there. So literally, the city of Palm Springs red-tagged all the structures in Section 14, saying they are out of compliance, that it’s a dangerous safety hazard and then the Palm Springs Fire Department came in to burn the neighborhood down to the ground, forcing everybody out.

Are we in a position to possibly award that land back to the families of Overtown and Section 14? The answer in both cases is no. What happens is that land now has been developed or improved. You’ve got interstates and freeways that are there. In Palm Springs you’ve got private properties, businesses and expensive homes.

One of the things that was unique about Bruce’s Beach was the fact that it was such a farce back in the 1920s. Why? The city of Manhattan Beach said it wanted to take the property because they had to build a park.

They never built a park, and that land sat vacant until I believe the 1980s when the county of Los Angeles finally built a structure on it for a lifeguard-training program.

Now, that doesn’t mean that the families that lost the properties should be without remedy. One thing I’ve been talking about is how, in Palm Springs, where that land is now, improved with hotels and restaurants and private homes—those are all uses that generate property taxes on an annual basis in perpetuity.

One thing that I’m pushing and talking about is collecting that property tax that the city generates from that property that was taken, and let’s redirect that property tax back to the families who had the property wrongly taken in the first place.

When you took this case on, did you go in thinking that this would be an inflection point for reparations?

No. When I got involved, I was thinking this has never been done before. To my knowledge, no government agency had ever returned property to a Black family after it had been wrongfully taken via racially motivated eminent domain.

And so my involvement was less about creating a model. It was much more around making sure that whoever was representing the family on this had the technical expertise and understanding to make sure that this would withstand legal challenge. And that’s exactly what we did.