Santa Monica will pay $350,000 to the descendants of Silas White, the Black entrepreneur who tried to build the Ebony Beach Club in the late 1950s only to have the city seize the property and shut the idea down. The site, on Ocean Avenue near Pico Boulevard, was meant to be a place where Black Angelenos could enjoy the beach without harassment and discrimination. The city instead condemned the property for public parking and later allowed private redevelopment. Today the site is home to the Viceroy Hotel.

White saw the Ebony Beach Club as both a business and a cultural statement. Nat King Cole was among the first to sign up as a member, and the club promised social outings, fishing trips, and a safe place to change before heading down to the shoreline. Santa Monica had a thriving Black community in Ocean Park at the time, and local businesses were beginning to organize around beach culture. White’s plan represented a claim to coastal belonging that the city’s white business class clearly did not want to allow.

What happened instead reflects a larger pattern in California history. Throughout the Jim Crow era, Black families built leisure spaces from Manhattan Beach to Santa Monica to protect themselves from racist exclusion. They were repeatedly pushed out by local governments wielding eminent domain, zoning changes, and redevelopment powers. The Bruce family’s oceanfront resort in Manhattan Beach was stolen in the 1920s. Bruce’s Beach was finally returned a century later, and that win helped inspire the White family to pursue their own restitution.

It has taken decades for Santa Monica to acknowledge even a fraction of the harm. This settlement agreement does not include an admission of wrongdoing, and it doesn’t return the land or restore what could have been a multigenerational community anchor for Black residents on the Westside.

Santa Monica has also created a Landback and Reparations Task Force to examine additional cases of displacement. The Ebony Beach Club is just one example of how public authority was used to police who got to exist at the water’s edge. The question now is whether this moment becomes a turning point or another one off settlement disconnected from systemic change.