Willa and Charles Bruce should be a portrait of the American dream. In 1912, they bought oceanfront property in Manhattan Beach, CA, to build a resort where Black families could enjoy the sun, sand, and sea in peace and safety. Within a few years, Bruce’s Beach was thriving, serving thousands of Black families. The future looked limitless, yet it was rapidly coming to an end.
In 1924, the City of Manhattan Beach used eminent domain to seize Bruce’s Beach and the property of other Black families under the pretense of building a city park. The Bruces received a fraction of what their property was worth, and it sat unused for decades.
Throughout history, Black families in the U.S. have had their land taken, losing not just property but a critical tool for building intergenerational wealth. Where the Bruce’s Beach story differs is in its ending. In 2022, Manhattan Beach and Los Angeles County gave the property back to the Bruce family, the first time in U.S. history that a government has returned property to a Black family taken through racially motivated eminent domain proceedings.
George Fatheree represented the Bruce family pro bono in the case, an experience that left a profound impact. “I had researched redlining and racial covenants, but when you see it in the flesh, it changes you forever,” he said. After their victory, Fatheree left his job as a commercial real estate attorney to bring attention to Black land loss and help families build intergenerational wealth through home ownership. In 2024, he took part in a residency at the Bellagio Center, where he developed the Black Land Loss Narrative Archive Project to document the stories of Black people and families whose land was lost.
We talked to Fatheree about his work on the Bruce’s Beach case, the Black Land Loss Narrative Archive, and the power of storytelling to change hearts, minds, and systems.
Lawsuits are important, but stories change the world.
George FathereeFounder, Black Land Loss Narrative Archive Project
What drew you to focus on Black land loss in the U.S.?
When I was a commercial real estate lawyer, I wasn’t doing the Lord’s work. I was buying and selling office buildings and hotels. But I did figure out how to use the firm’s platform to support issues that mattered to me and my family—through pro bono representation, board service, charitable donations, things like that.
After a case that helped preserve and make public 4.5 million photographs of Black America from Ebony and Jet Magazines, a friend sent me an article about Bruce’s Beach. I read it, got mad and decided to do something.
I knew we had one shot to get this right, and I wanted to do something that could serve as a playbook and a precedent. So I went out to find the Bruce descendants and wound up representing them.
What was different about the Bruce’s Beach case? How did it succeed where other Black land loss cases haven’t?
People often assume we developed some brilliant legal strategy or loophole. It really wasn’t that. What we had was an incredibly well-preserved and compelling story. When you share what was done to the Bruce family with people who have the power to do something, it’s hard to ignore. Their natural response is to say “That’s not right,” and try to do something.
Timing was also critical. We launched the case around the same time as the public murder of George Floyd. That changed the conversation in our country, at least for a time. We had this short window to make it happen.
In the wake of our case, more efforts have popped up across the U.S., with different levels of success. The City of Palm Springs settled with survivors of the destruction of Section 14, a Black neighborhood destroyed by city agents in the 1930s. In Santa Monica, the city council voted to explore compensating the family of Silas White, a Black entrepreneur whose Ebony Beach Club was seized by the city and then sold to private developers. There are cases in Renton, Washington, Alabama, and other places, too. But they’re still too few and far between.
Since the Bruce case, you’ve moved away from practicing law to focus on capturing the stories of Black families whose land was lost. Why?
Lawsuits are important, but stories change the world. Manhattan Beach still has a lower percentage of Black residents than almost any city in Los Angeles County. If you know the story, you know why. But if you don’t, you might think, “Black people don’t like living by the beach,” or “Black people don’t have as much money, so they can’t afford to live here.”
The truth is that, half a generation out of slavery, Black people were building wealth and acquiring property, and they got jacked. But without the stories of what really happened, people are free to blame it on behavior, personal responsibility or innate capability. And every time we lose one of these stories, the false narratives become harder to correct, and we risk being permanently stuck with them.
After Bruce’s Beach, I started getting emails and voice messages every day from families looking for help with land loss. Their stories are haunting, things like, “My grandfather’s neighbor forged his name on our deed, and we lost 40 acres,” or “The sheriff came with guns and said that if we didn’t leave to our cattle ranch, there would be trouble.” For most, our legal system provides no remedy.
My response was the Black Land Loss Narrative Archive Project, which collects, preserves and amplifies stories of African-American land loss in the U.S. The goal is to inspire awareness, activism and political leadership to address racial discrepancies in wealth, home ownership and other socioeconomic outcomes. And a big part is changing the narrative on why those gaps exist in the first place.
The project isn’t about legal help or getting land back. It’s about recognizing that what happened to Black people and families is important. When we sit down with people, we talk to them about what happened, who owned the land, how it was taken from them, what happened afterwards and what they think justice would look like. And the impact can be astounding.
When we finish the conversation, you can see on their face how much of an effect sharing their story has made. They have this tangible sense of relief, knowing that someone has listened to, believed and recorded their story.
The Black Land Loss Narrative Archive is highly inspired by the Shoah Foundation’s work collecting stories of Holocaust and genocide survivors. And like that work, there’s real urgency to get it done. Many of these things happened decades ago, and the people who lived through them are dying. If we don’t record their stories, they could be lost forever.
Do you think this work will help Black families who’ve lost their land to find justice?
People often ask me how it felt to get justice for the Bruce family. I usually respond that they didn’t get justice. They lost a hundred years of beachfront property wealth.
During my residency at the Bellagio Center, I gave a presentation where I said, “I know these families will never get justice, but I want to make sure their stories are preserved.” Afterwards, a woman came up to me and said, “What you said isn’t true.” She described how, after Apartheid fell, the South African government created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which formally recorded stories about how Black families’ land was taken, how their family members were killed, things like that.
She told me that the act of telling your story and having it heard is a form of justice. It’s not how I might think about justice as an American lawyer, but it’s a form of restitutional or transitional or restorative justice. That conversation has really fueled my work.
It also helped me realize something important about the Bellagio Center residency program. The project you’re really there to work on is yourself. The program gives you a month to sit with these amazing people, to talk to and learn from them. It’s an opportunity to think about big social change, what it is and how to get there. So whatever you may have come to work on, the project is really you.
How do you see your work changing the course of these issues and this conversation?
I’ve got tremendous faith in my fellow Americans and our capacity for empathy, compassion and fairness.
Folks are fine being the beneficiaries of inheritance, but they usually don’t want to talk about responsibility. They say, “It wasn’t me who took that land.” Nothing is more effective than stories in helping overcome that, so we can foster shared understanding and empathy around why things are like this, why it’s not right, why we have to do something about it.
The capacity of stories to influence beliefs and actions makes me hopeful. If we can collect and share these stories, it will make it hard for good-hearted people to do nothing.
What we do from there is an important question, but it’s one that the next group will focus on. My piece and this project’s piece is collecting and amplifying these stories, so we can say, “This happened, and we’re still seeing the effects of it.” We won’t be okay as a country unless we do something about it.
History is the stories that remain. Untold, they disappear forever. Recording, preserving and sharing the stories of Black people and families whose land was taken ensures that their experiences are not erased. But we have to act fast. “The grandparents and older folks who saw their land stolen are dying every day,” Fatheree said. “If we don’t do this now, it won’t get done. Every minute counts.”
While The Rockefeller Foundation provided support to the authors to create this project, the Foundation is not responsible for the project and does not recommend or endorse the contents of the article.
Learn More:
- Read more about Fatheree’s work by visiting his website.
- Explore the work of the Black Land Loss Narrative Archive Project.
- Listen to Fatheree talk about the Bruce’s Beach case on the Re-Examination Podcast.