Growing up poor in Harlem during the crack epidemic of the 1980s, being taught more about the ways of the world by women in the neighborhood than by her own parents, becoming a first-generation college graduate — Kavon Ward thought all those trials and tribulations must have happened for a reason.
She could move to California, be her own version of Harry Belafonte — among actors who use their platforms to spur social change and liberation for Black people — and live a comfortable life.
But now, Ward believes her purpose for coming to Los Angeles in 2015 was something much bigger than herself: reclaiming land for a Black family that was taken from their ancestors.
“It turns out that it prepared me to fight to get the land back to the Bruce family,” Ward says. “All throughout my life, I can remember being prepared for this fight.”
And, her 5-year-old daughter, Semira Germaine, was the reason Ward landed right where she needed to be to do that, on the South Bay coast, in Manhattan Beach.
Ward, who now lives in Los Angeles outside the South Bay, had initially moved to Manhattan Beach so that Semira could be closer to her father and grandparents, who lived in the neighboring Hermosa Beach.
Around Memorial Day 2020, two different people on Nextdoor randomly sent Ward a 2016 Daily Breeze blog post detailing a Black couple’s early 20th century plight to maintain the business they’d built by the Manhattan Beach shore.
“I didn’t pay attention to it the first time because I was pissed about George Floyd’s murder,” Ward says.
But once she did read the history, Ward knew she had to do something.
As it goes, in 1912 Willa and Charles Bruce purchased a lot between 26th and 27th streets, along what’s now The Strand in Manhattan Beach. It was part of an area set aside by landowner George Peck for African American buyers.
The couple in 1915 started constructing a beach-side resort called Bruce’s Beach Lodge. In 1920, they bought another lot with a two-story building to add a dance hall and restaurant on what today is Bruce’s Beach Park.
But then, in 1924, the city took the Bruces’ property through eminent domain — a legal maneuver allowing the government to take private property for public use — to turn it into a park. The resort closed. But Black people continued to visit the beach, despite ongoing resistance from the much-larger White community. A number of Black people were even arrested on a couple of occasions in 1927, for being on the beach. The resort itself was torn down that year.
The Bruces and three other families sued the city after Bruce’s Beach Lodge was torn down, arguing Manhattan Beach was trying to displace them. But by the time the lawsuit was settled, in 1929, the Bruces had left Manhattan Beach.
A call to action
Learning what had happened to the Bruces and their enterprise, Ward planned an event for June 19, 2020, at Bruce’s Beach Park to celebrate Juneteenth, the anniversary of when the last group of enslaved African Americans in Galveston, Texas, found out about the Emancipation Proclamation on that date in 1865. At the event, Ward also called attention to the truth of why the 2020 picnic venue that was initially developed as a Black leisure site was now a hilly, grassy public recreation area.
That event at the park in Manhattan Beach sparked a movement that has since brought forth state legislation to remove restrictions on the Bruce’s Beach deed which now allows Los Angeles County to give the property to Bruce descendants, including Willa and Charles’ great-great-great grandson, Anthony Bruce.
Ward was no stranger to making things happen: After getting her master’s of public administration from the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Ward moved to Washington D.C. and became a Congressional Black Caucus fellow. Before that, she had earned her bachelor’s degree in communications from the State University of New York at Oneonta.
“That is what really opened up my eyes,” Ward says. “I started to see the tools and policies created and used to keep people of color — specifically Black people — marginalized and to keep the playing field unleveled.”
Being part of the 3% of Blacks attending SUNY Oneonta at the time, Ward slowly started to become conscious that she and her people were being treated like “outsiders.”
“We all stuck together for the most part,” she says. “It was a culture shock because I had never been around that many White people [because] I’d lived in an all-Black community; Harlem was all I knew,” Ward says.
It wasn’t until she was in her 20s that Ward learned about the 1921 Race Massacre in the Greenwood District — an affluent Black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which White rioters had destroyed homes and businesses, killing as many as 300 of the African Americans who built what they thought was their haven.
New York’s Central Park also had been a Black neighborhood, called Seneca Village, before the city in 1857 used eminent domain to condemn properties on the land, forcing out all residents there.
“I remember being so upset,” Ward says, “because I’d learned what happened to Black people who were entrepreneurs and who did so much to build within their communities when they were left out and forced out of other opportunities.”
These were “Black folks who made it happen and kept the dollars in their own community,” Ward says. “To see how the government took part in destroying that” was infuriating.
This knowledge began to draw her into her purpose.
“I’ve always had this advocacy, activist spirit,” Ward says, “But it’s shown up in different ways throughout my life; I don’t think I looked for spaces to stand up for people, it just always kind of called me.”
After her Congressional Black Caucus fellowship, she started lobbying for a national nonprofit, encouraging policy makers to establish laws benefiting poor children and families like childcare, Head Start education programs, juvenile justice and keeping Black families together.
Forging a legacy of change
Growing up, “I was left to my own devices down 125th Street, Harlem,” Ward says. “There was this desire to grow and be better.
“I didn’t grow up among a family of activists,” adds Ward, her tone matching her sweet, yet steel-wrapped demeanor. “That’s not my story. I grew up with people who were the victims of the war on drugs, crack being pushed into our communities, my mother and father were on drugs; my father went to jail for selling drugs.
“I grew up extremely poor and didn’t grow up with a leader in leadership at all in any way, but I did call on my guardian angels — I’ve had phenomenal Black women in my corner since I was 11 years old.”
But being the first in her family to attend and graduate from college, get a master’s degree and reaching back into where she came from weren’t feats that Ward claims to have accomplished on her own.
She credits “amazing Black mentors” who included a producer for the “CBS Evening News,” along with the Harlem YMCA for helping her step into the role of advocate. An internship with the Coca-Cola beverage company also influenced her where some employees “picked up the baton and groomed me on how to survive in a corporate environment that’s not always friendly to Black people,” Ward says.
Though Ward didn’t necessarily inherit the will to do this work, she’s paving the way of advocacy for Semira.
“She knows that Mommy is changing the world,” Ward says, “and she follows that up with ‘I’m changing the world too.’
“It makes sense because if I didn’t have my daughter, I wouldn’t have moved to Manhattan Beach. Just as much as I was aligned to do this work, Semira was too. She’s very much important to this.”
Semira sometimes asks, “Why do you work so much?” To which her mother responds, “I’ve got to change the world.”
“But that got me thinking,” Ward says. “Her mere existence is helping me change the world.”
An uphill battle
Although Ward was nurtured while visiting her local Harlem YMCA as a child, she says her time as a corporate employee with YMCA of the USA confirmed what she would no longer let herself experience in a workplace.
She was used to doing her job out in the field, but says that working in the office of the national organization exposed her to another side. “It didn’t align with my spirit,” Ward says of that corporate setting.
She says she faced harassment, retaliation and discrimination for voicing Black-serving ideas at work starting in 2009. Once, for example, a White woman put her hand on Ward’s face, as if to reprimand a child.
Instead of leaving when things got hard, Ward withstood what she endured, writing down and keeping tabs on everything in order to build her case, which eventually resulted in a lawsuit.
“They saw what I was doing: not letting up,” Ward says. “I was going to stay and keep documenting, and they decided to fire me.”
Another time, a “White woman said I threatened her life, to hurt her,” Ward says. “They said, ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy.’” But the woman had alleged that the incident happened a year before she’d spoken about it.
“It became clear that they had no other grounds (to fire me) so they had to make up one,” Ward says. “That was my first encounter of betrayal by White people.”
After all that, Ward has had a difficult time trusting White people.
There are “these preconceived notions they have about Black people,” Ward believes. “We are not a monolith,” she says of her people.
Finding her voice through poetry
While dealing with the lawsuit against the YMCA of the USA, Ward wrote poetry to express how she felt about it all.
At the same time, Trayvon Martin and many other Black people were being killed with racial motivation.
It “opened my eyes to how this country continues to treat us,” Ward says. “I started writing about all the Black people killed by police and started performing” the pieces.
Ward became a poet-activist on the East Coast, opening for rapper Common and others.
She often revives her talent for spoken word in her activism, like when she read her original poem “Reparations” at a 2020 protest that demanded restitution for Bruce’s Beach.
“You keep telling me and my people to ‘get over it,’ but how can we when the consequences are still existing? When your grandfather clock of wealth continues to tick? As long as you keep benefiting from my people’s timeless misfortunes, you should never fix your expectations for me to forget,” Ward bellowed that day.
“I had a whole new life,” Ward says about involvement in theater and poetry. That “opened up doors to acting.” She decided to use the settlement money she received in the lawsuit against YMCA of the USA to move to California and pursue a TV and film career.
Standing in her truth
Ward started a vending machine business to give herself the autonomy to audition for roles. Ultimately, she met her daughter’s father, got engaged and had her daughter.
Semira’s presence slowly but surely exposed to her mother what Ward’s next mission actually was.
Gelling first-hand experience with what she’d learned working with government policy, each similar encounter that followed the YMCA ordeal was now more obvious. Ward’s construction of a social justice movement in Manhattan Beach about a decade after the lawsuit wasn’t immune to those biases.
Ward in 2020 had formed a group called Anti-Racist Moms around the South Bay, with which she’d put on the Juneteenth picnic that year at Bruce’s Beach.
Some members of that group later that year didn’t support Ward when naysayers from the community, who were against justice for the Bruces, blew “dog whistles” toward her, she says, telling people to “come after her.”
“I needed to get a gun to protect myself,” Ward says. “These White people (in ARMs) were telling me how I should spend money to protect me, a single Black woman in Manhattan Beach, and my child.”
The anger of the memory speeds up her words.
“You tell me to get a (surveillance) camera — White, liberal women thinking they’re so ‘woke,’ not seeing how they contribute to the issue thinking they know everything,” not truly listening to what her needs were.
Some articles on a 2020 Bruce’s Beach protest further endangered Ward’s life, she says, by amplifying only parts of the demonstration during which speakers used curse words, but ignoring the parts when they were describing through tears how they felt about being minimized as Black people in America.
“I’m the face of this movement; the only Black-presenting (dark-skinned) person on that team, only one living in Manhattan Beach,” Ward says of being targeted at the time.
Ward also happened to be the only single mother in the group.
“It baffles me as a Black woman on the frontlines, the only one responsible for my daughter and home, for you to tell me how we should protect us, and threaten to leave the cause because I’m not doing it the way you want me to.”
That’s “why I left (that group) and started Justice for Bruce’s Beach,” a movement dedicated to getting Willa and Charles’ descendants ownership of the parcel of land on which the former resort sat.
‘Where is my land?’ Now give it back.
American history starts and proceeds with the stealing of land, from European settlers claiming Native American land as “property,” to those pilgrims’ descendants ensuring through establishing law that only they continue to “own” the best areas.
“They want it so they can remain superior,” Ward says. “They’re superior because they’ve stolen and pillaged and created policy that keeps them on top.”
Generations have tried their hand at shifting those power structures, but Ward has dedicated much of herself to untangling that origin of theft.
“When we had the chance and developed these communities, y’all started hating and tore it down,” Ward says. “Every time we build and develop something, y’all take it and then blame us for our own misfortunes.”
It has happened to many Black people, in many states, during the past century and before. The Associated Press, in fact, published findings of an 18-month investigation in 2001 that documented 406 black landowners losing more than 24,000 acres, ranging from the antebellum era to the mid-20th century. Nearly all that land, the AP wrote, was worth millions of dollars at the time the investigation was published.
Black people, then, were always given certain parameters of livelihood, only allowed to buy property in areas of respective cities where their White counterparts weren’t interested in living, and redlined out of the “desirable” areas through unaffordable home prices and flat-out racial restrictions on deeds.
In the 1940s, the U.S. started using eminent domain to condemn land in order to build a national highway system. This disproportionately kicked Black people off their property without comparable restitution to relocate.
And while those White rioters in 1921 destroyed Tulsa’s Black Wall Street in the Midwest, Willa and Charles Bruce were unknowingly getting their ducks in a row for a 1924 fight to keep their beachfront land on the West Coast.
As Ward learned more about racism in history, it was easier for her to draw the connection between why Black Americans have so little wealth and opportunity compared to the White people who took it from them.
“I started to realize Black people are treated differently,” Ward says. “I didn’t understand the root of it, but became familiar with Black Wall Street and the understanding that there was a conscious effort to keep the truth of Black history away from us.”
Ward, then, truly realized that the work of restoring Black land ownership taken from White-controlled government structures was one of her life’s missions when she saw what was happening for the Bruces because of her dedication to advocating for that family’s needs, lobbying to state and county stakeholders.
In April 2021, state Sen. Steven Bradford and Los Angeles County Supervisor Janice Hahn announced Senate Bill 796, legislation that removed state deed restrictions to allow the county to return the land to Bruce descendants. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the bill in September 2021.
“Once there was a commitment for the policy to be changed, I knew I was called to do this,” Ward says.
She told everyone at the 2020 Juneteenth celebration she’d hosted at Bruce’s Beach, “I just want to see policy changed to deed the land back to the family.”
More than a year later, it happened. And it was clear that Ward was walking in her destiny.
“This whole process has solidified and confirmed that this is the work I’m supposed to be doing,” Ward says of the movement and legislation timeline.
Once SB 796 began moving forward, people started asking Ward for help getting their own families’ property back.
“I was the voice for so many people in that situation” of the Bruce’s Beach fight, Ward says.
“My conscience didn’t feel good to do a one-and-done (and decide) I’m not going to help anyone else,” Ward says. “I have some power; I’m not going to let it be in vain.”
She thought, “How can I use my power and platform to help other Black families? I stepped forward and said, ‘This is going to be my life’s work.’”
“I was hoping to sit back and reap the benefits of all the hard work I’d done from college (on); even though, (like youth from my neighborhood who didn’t have the same opportunities), I was supposed to end up dead,” Ward says.
Ward “got to lobby (for fair policy), I got to help my people, (I thought now it’s time to) be comfortable and enjoy the fruits of my labor, but I had another thing coming.”
“Every time I tried to step away from advocacy it just called me back,” Ward says. “It wasn’t until (she found herself calling for justice in) the Bruce’s Beach situation that I realized everything that happened prior to that was preparing me for Bruce’s Beach.”
In July 2021, Ward launched a national organization, Where Is My Land. She’s helping uncover the hidden histories of stolen Black land around the country, like Bruce’s Beach, and working to get restitution of their former properties.
“I’ve kind of done something that hasn’t been done before,” Ward says, “Not just by myself, but the fire I lit started something that created history; I can’t walk away from that.”
