When Black People Almost Gained Beach Access in 1920s Orange County
Today, this spot hosts a mobile-home park. In the early 1920s, Black residents in Southern California were pinning their hopes here on a beach club that would accommodate them. At the time, although California's constitution declares all beaches are public up to the mean high tide line, Southern Californians understood "public" to mean only the white public. In the early twentieth century, Black people could swim in only two beaches in the region: Santa Monica’s Inkwell and Bruce's Beach in Manhattan Beach, a Black-owned property that the city eventually took away from its owners via eminent domain. (Last year, Los Angeles County officially deeded the land back to the descendents of the owners.) Both were spaces of pollution and harassment, where racists regularly beat beachgoers and slashed their tires.
Hoping for a better reception across the county line, a coalition of Black business leaders led by E. Burton Ceruti, co-founder of the Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP, grouped together to form the Pacific Beach Club, selling $100 memberships for the construction of a planned private resort facility for Black people in Huntington Beach. An ad in the California Eagle, a leading Black newspaper, promised the Pacific Beach Club "will fulfill a long-needed want… something that has previously been denied… a place of our own."
Explore some of the spaces in Orange County shaped by land rights. Click on the starred map points to read more in-depth stories.
On Labor Day 1925, nearly 10,000 Black spectators came to witness a Black bathing beauty contest and a promise by Cerutti that the Pacific Beach Club would open in six months, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday. But Ceruti and his group immediately faced opposition from white society. Residents openly harassed workers. The city of Huntington Beach refused to extend any electric or gas lines to the club. The Pacific Electric and Southern Pacific rail lines declined to extend their tracks to the club, severely limiting any possible public access.
Just a couple of weeks before its grand opening, the Pacific Beach Club mysteriously burned down. No one was ever prosecuted and there were never any efforts to rebuild. Huntington Beach residents quickly formed an organization to "oppose any further efforts of negroes to establish a colony on the oceanfront."
Today, Orange County remains the only major metropolitan area in the United States with a Black community that constitutes less than 5%of the total population; the 2.1% figure in the 2020 U.S. Census has remained steady for decades. Last year, Huntington Beach saw its first-ever Black councilmember when Rhonda Bolton was appointed. At her swearing-in ceremony, some residents booed.
