[Kavon Ward] In the beginning of the 20th century, Black people owned 15 million acres of land.

By the beginning of the 21st century, 90% of that land was gone.

It was taken.

♪ tense, emotional theme with piano, viola and staccato strings ♪ [Kavon Ward] Generational wealth is providing an opportunity for your kids and your kids' kids to be able to afford to go to college without taking out loans, establishing home ownership, ensuring that you can use it to buy more property, use it to start a business.

It is a safety net for the most vulnerable people in this country, and that is Black people.

♪ percussive underscore ♪ [Narrator] The Black community in the United States and in California have been fighting against discriminatory housing and property laws since the fight for reparations started.

♪ percussive underscore ♪ [Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] The problem has been historically that there have been policies that have disadvantaged African Americans, that have undermined their efforts, and that have also simultaneously benefited the efforts and the investments of white Americans.

You're talking about a whole generation of African Americans who are unable to save for their futures.

♪ It's beautiful day in California ♪ ♪ You can smell the fragrance off my shirt its called doja ♪ [Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] Though there is a narrative about California being very progressive and liberal place, and it was not party to the formal industry of African enslavement.

But slavery set into motion a particular relationship that African Americans continue to be positioned within.

♪ Ain't nothing changed but the days and the weather ♪ ♪ I'm living great but I could be living better ♪ [Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] California have a responsibility to update the terms by which we recognize the ongoing injuries faced by this community.

There's a contemporary set of harm in terms of education, in terms of various other opportunities for the loss of property or the land and the persons who worked on the land.

♪ haunting, emotional blues theme ♪ [Kavon Ward] The first time I learned about Bruce's Beach was shortly after George Floyd was murdered back in 2020.

I had at that point lived in the city of Manhattan Beach for two years.

I had no idea that there were Black people who were essentially co-founders of that city, and people who actually owned land on the strand close to the water.

♪ blues theme fades ♪ ♪ upbeat, joyful melody with whistler, trumpets, trombones and flute ♪ [Narrator] In 1912, Willa and Charles Bruce bought property in the Strand area for $1,225 from Los Angeles Real Estate and turned it into a hotspot for the Black community where Black people could enjoy leisure due to the segregation laws followed at the time.

♪ dark, mournful piano and eerie synths ♪ This was during a time of strict racial boundaries where the Black and white communities were not supposed to mix.

[Kavon Ward] The City of Manhattan Beach took this land from this Black couple.

It angered me.

[Narrator] As the property value in the area soared and the pressure to push out Black communities intensified, Manhattan Beach City took over the property in 1924 through forced eminent domain.

Eminent domain is when the government seizes private property from its owners for public use through compensation, with or without the owner's consent.

The taking of this property devastated the Black community, and it stayed that way until 2021.

[Kavon Ward] That is when I knew I had to do something.

[Narrator] Almost 98 years later, through a concerted effort by activists like Kavon Ward and social justice groups like Land Back and California Legislative Black Caucus advocating that the land be returned to the descendants, the city officials finally voted in agreement to return the property in 2022.

[crowd cheering and clapping] ♪ tense, emotional theme with piano, viola and staccato strings ♪ [Kavon Ward] When I tell my five-year-old, if you take something from someone and they didn't give it to you, if you take it, you return it.

[Narrator] But other locations are more difficult to return to their original owners, like the town of Allensworth.

♪ sentimental, bell-like synths ♪ Located in the San Joaquin Valley, this tiny farm town was founded in 1908 by a group of formerly enslaved men led by Colonel Allen Allensworth, who fought in the Civil War and migrated to California to start a new life.

Born enslaved in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1842, Colonel Allensworth became the highest ranking Black officer in the U.S. Army when he retired in 1906.

♪ sentimental, bell-like synths with added percussion ♪ [Steven Bradford] Allensworth be a fine example as well that's happened to that African American town in Tulare County, where it was a thriving town until white farmers cut off the water supply to the town, eliminated the train stop, and all but decimated a community that was thriving.

[Damien Goodman] My great-great-grandfather, Charles Blodgett, and great-great-granddaughter, Ellen Blodgett, married Nella Allensworth, the daughter of Colonel Allen Allensworth, migrated from the segregated South around 1904.

So I stand here today on the shoulders of my ancestors, the land that is the basis of all independence, of freedom, justice, and equality.

[Steven Bradford] Allensworth is identified as a State Historical Park, but if anyone has been to Allensworth, at best, it's a ghost town.

The state has a debt of obligation to make this facility whole, and also educate the rest of California of the importance of this town that was founded by a African American colonel who served this country.

♪ haunting, emotional blues theme ♪ [Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] African Americans in the history of the United States and within the state of California have been this kind of available category of persons who can be removed, who can be, you know, exploited when it suits the state.

♪ blues theme continues ♪ [Narrator] Through the establishment of unjust laws and urban development programs, the state and local government would continue to devastate and displace Black communities.

The devastation and displacement of Black communities can even be found here in the Bay Area.

[Oakland resident] This is my house, and what am I gonna do?

Move out and pay rent somewhere else after I bought the house?

I can't pay for another house at 65.

♪ atmospheric synths with marimba-like sounds ♪ [Donald Tamaki] Between 1935 and the late 1940s, the government issued about $120 billion in low-interest housing assistance loans.

98% of those loans went to white people.

This was the transfer of wealth to help build today's middle class.

Government and private parties and lenders aligned together to create maps to assist lenders on what loans would be made to people in California and in the rest of the country, and the maps classified neighborhoods as A, B, C, or D. So the outcomes that we have of ultra hyper-segregated neighborhoods which have concentrations of poverty and lack of services were planned.

[Interviewer] What did Mrs. Jones say to you when you called?

[San Francisco resident] They'd have a two-room available, and that I would have first preferences.

No one knew about it.

At the end of the conversation, she asked me if I was white, and I said, "No, I'm not."

She said, "You're a Negro?"

I said, "Yes, I am."

She said, "I'm sorry.

This is a all-white area," and she told me I needn't bother even coming in and putting in an application.

♪ confident, introspective jazz theme ♪ [Donald Tamaki] It is not a surprise.

In the 1950s, 20,000 Black people in the Fillmore District, a thriving community, were displaced, almost 900 Black businesses destroyed and dispersed to the Bay Area and other places.

♪ confident, introspective jazz theme ♪ [Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] If you think about North Oakland and South Berkeley, both sides of that border really, you know, constituting a Black community.

♪ confident, introspective jazz theme ♪ On the North Oakland side, upper middle class, historically, largely Black working class like other minority community.

But the highway is constructed, and you see the impacts of that infrastructure development all to the benefit of the local municipalities, the state, and everybody who's engaged in commerce.

People have to get to work.

Goods are being shipped.

If you've built a life for yourself, despite segregation, when private capital or the state decides that, well, that area is needed for other purposes, what you see through gentrification is, again, this community being seen as a kind of fungible or portable kind of entity.

All of that came with cost to those families who were directly impacted, I lost my home, I lost my business, but to the whole ecosystem of these Black communities.

South Berkeley can show us that, North Oakland can show us that.

We can go to Los Angeles.

It's also a national phenomenon as well.

♪ stirring, emotional, bright piano theme ♪ Slave owners were paid for the loss of property, and by property, I mean both the land and the persons who worked on the land.

And we know that the British government only paid off that loan, which provided reparations to former British slave owners, in 2015, [Narrator] After emancipation, through the Compensated Emancipation Act of 1862, reparations were paid to slave owners up to $300 per freed persons.

♪ stirring, emotional, bright piano theme ♪ If the government recognized the importance of compensating for that loss at that time, what about the displacement and property loss of the Black community today?

[Donald Tamaki] Today's world is always part of a continuum of a prior generation, some good, some not so good.

That's also part of the American fabric, where there is a process of correcting and repairing it.

And that's what a society is about, and yes, it does involve taking on burdens, but that's what justice is.

That's what America inspires to be.

[Kavon Ward] When I started speaking to these families as it relates to how Black land theft impacted their lives with that, they owned hundreds of acres of land, then had to be uprooted and moved and leave their communities that they built, and then they were chased off of their land, and their lives were threatened, and then they were living in poverty.

They had hundreds of acres of land, and they died from heartache.

[Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis] I want everybody to kind of really look to their communities and understand how those communities have formed.

Why do you live in a neighborhood without diversity?

It was likely policy for the majority of your community's history.

What we're dealing with is actually, you know, a shared situation and a shared experience, and so there must be a shared responsibility.

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