Manhattan Beach will recognize Juneteenth this year with two events, first through a ceremony on the holiday — which commemorates the day the last Black Americans learned slavery had ended — and second, with a bigger celebration the following weekend that will also honor Black history and culture.
Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day on which the last enslaved Black people in America learned of their freedom. Those former slaves, in Galveston, Texas, heard the news two years after the Emancipation Proclamation gave them rights to free, individual lives.
Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021; the day, previously not officially recognized and primarily celebrated among Black communities, received mainstream attention after a nationwide racial reckoning in 2020 sparked by George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police that year.
Bruce’s Beach’s racial history also resurfaced through a Juneteenth event that activist Kavon Ward hosted at the park in 2020.
That event shed light on the Black couple, Willa and Charles Bruce, who, in the 1920s, ran a seaside resort for Black people on two parcels below the land that would become Bruce’s Beach Park. The city at the time used eminent domain to take that land, as well as the homes of others whose properties were on what’s now parkland.
Manhattan Beach activist and organizer Allison Hales through her nonprofit Culture Club South Bay in 2021 held a second, bigger Juneteenth celebration at the park. But the budding annual tradition came to a halt when the city reinforced a 2018 special events policy to deter large-scale events at small parks, including at Bruce’s Beach Park; city-sponsored events are excluded from that rule.
This year, the city’s Juneteenth Ceremony will take place from 10 to 11 a.m. Wednesday, June 19, at Bruce’s Beach Park, and will feature community and special guest speakers, and a gospel choir performance to honor African American history.
The city will also host a Juneteenth Celebration and Concert from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, June 22, at Polliwog Park.
Both events, intended to foster reverence, education and community engagement, according to the city’s website, will be put on in partnership with Black in Mayberry, an El Segundo organization that works to combat racism through the arts.
The June 22 celebration will continue from 3 to 5 p.m. at the Manhattan Beach Library, where Ina the Sunshine Storyteller and Chazz Ross will perform interactive shows rooted in African American history.
Following that, the Los Angeles County Library will inaugurate the Manhattan Beach Library’s Bruce’s Beach Collaborative Collection, which includes around 1,500 African and African American history books donated by Anthony Lee, a local historian who was on the Bruce’s Beach Task Force in Manhattan Beach and is a member of advocacy group MB United. Lee will also discuss the local history and significance of Juneteenth.
Black in Mayberry, meanwhile, will host its own third annual Juneteenth Festival from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday, June 15, at El Segundo Recreation Park. There will be vendor booths, music and dance performances, games for children and more.
And two days before that, on Thursday, June 13, Lee said, the El Segundo United Sweat Equity Alliance will sponsor a lecture at the El Segundo Public Library by historian Alison Rose Jefferson, the author of “Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era,” which chronicles the history of Bruce’s Beach and similar historic Black leisure sites.