Approximately 21800 Pacific Coast Highway, Huntington Beach
Although California’s state constitution declares all beaches “public” up to the mean high tide line, in the first half of the twentieth century, “public” was understood to mean only the white public.
‘Black people who wanted to enjoy Los Angeles–area beaches had limited choices: Bruce’s Beach in Manhattan Beach or the Inkwell in Santa Monica, both polluted spaces where city councils used zoning and eminent domain to discourage Black property ownership in nearby neighborhoods. At Bruce’s and the Inkwell, racists regularly beat beachgoers and slashed the tires of their cars. Perhaps hoping for a better reception across the county line, in 1925, African American lawyer E. Burton Ceruti bought seven acres of shoreline here for a private resort he advertised as “The Last Chance for Our Race to Secure Beach Frontage near Los Angeles.”
Ceruti collected $100 subscriptions from potential beach club members to raise $10,000 to purchase this land from white lawyer Hal H. Clark, who agreed to invest $150,000 of his own in exchange for 86 percent of profits over the club’s first ten years. Ceruti and Clark planned an elaborate resort to be constructed of white stucco, including a ballroom for 2,000 dancers, a bathhouse for 1,600, a restaurant for 700, a boardwalk to resemble Atlantic City, a grocery, a concession stand, two hundred cottages, and a clubhouse containing reading rooms, smoking rooms, a billiard room, and theater. At a publicity event for the future resort, held on Labor Day 1925, Huntington Beach was jammed with more than ten thousand guests who arrived in over two thousand automobiles, celebrating middle-class African American leisure.
In an editorial reprinted in African American newspapers as far away as New York, the Chicago Defender declared, “The Pacific Beach Club is a welcome advent in our community life and it is up to all of us who can qualify as members to become participants. . . . It will be here where we can gather in the privacy of our own and command the respect of all and protect against the intruder. Recreation is harmless and entertaining pleasures is part of life that modern civilization owes to every man.”
Unfortunately, many Orange County white people did not see Black people’s recreation as harmless. The Huntington Beach and Newport Beach chambers of commerce passed resolutions in opposition to the Pacific Beach Clubhouse. White citizens petitioned the Orange County Board of Supervisors to condemn it. The first contractor quit suddenly in the middle of construction. The Pacific Electric Railway Company refused to grant the club a right-of-way across the tracks between the road and the clubhouse. Finally, the resort mysteriously burned down just weeks before its planned grand opening, which had been slated for Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, 1926. Mainstream Orange County historians claim Ceruti set the fire himself to collect the insurance money, but many others suspect arson. No one was ever caught.
After the fire, the Orange County Board of Supervisors renewed efforts to condemn the now-cheaper property. Ceruti and his fellow investors discovered that Clark had not invested his own money, as stipulated in their contract, but had instead taken out a $19,000 mortgage now in danger of foreclosure. They attempted to raise enough money to buy out this mortgage, but Clark—perhaps alarmed by pressure from his Orange County neighbors—urged Black shareholders to relinquish their now-endangered investments. The Pacific Beach Club collapsed.
Huntington Beach did have one Black lifeguard, Henry Brooks, in the 1920s, with two other Black lifeguards at Newport Beach in the 1930s. Huntington Beach now has sixteen million beach visitors annually, but, according to the US Census, only 1.2 percent of Huntington Beach residents are African American—lower even than the countywide figure of 2.1 percent.
To Learn More
- Devienne, Elsa. “Urban Renewal by the Sea: Reinventing the Beach for the Suburban Age in Postwar Los Angeles.” Journal of Urban History 45, no. 1 (2019): 99–125.
- Kahrl, Andrew. The Land Was Ours: African-American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.
- Reft, Ryan. “Fighting for Leisure: African Americans, Beaches, and Civil Rights in Early 20th Century LA.” KCET, May 6, 2014. www.kcet.org/history-society/fighting-for-leisure-african-americans-beaches-and-civil-rights-in-early-20th.
- African-American youth enjoy a beach near L.A. in 1925, possible the Pacific Beach Club spot. Unknown photographer, Shades of L.A. Collection, Los Angeles Public Library.