Blackened dreams: recalling the Pacific Beach Club a century after the African American resort in O.C. burned
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The mood was bright 100 years ago as the Pacific Beach Club neared completion by today’s Newland Street and Pacific Coast Highway — just south of Huntington Beach’s 1925 borders. Southern California’s Black community had jumped over multiple roadblocks as it focused plans on this undistinguished stretch of sand.
Building in Orange County made sense, given the “informal but pervasive Jim Crow” that put Los Angeles County beaches off limits to Blacks, relates Daniel Cady, Ph.D., American history professor at Fresno State University.
The stakes were high, the need to act urgent, a 1925 ad in the Black-owned California Eagle newspaper told readers.
“The whites have for years enjoyed their clubs and organizations,” it stated. “We must at this time awake … NOW is the time … There is … no place left on the Pacific Near Los Angeles where we may congregate for any purpose.”
Titled “‘Southern’ California: White Southern Migrants in Greater Los Angeles 1920-1930,” Cady’s 2005 dissertation offers the most complete account of the Pacific Beach Club story. It outlines a familiar narrative — Black aspirations frustrated by white fear, discomfort and racism.
That the story is not widely known is a shame. We never heard it at Peterson Elementary School — about a mile from the Pacific Beach Club site. Nothing told me until an April 2, 1925, Los Angeles Times item, “Beach Club is Proposed by Negroes” popped up in my database browsing a few years ago.
The 1930 U.S. Census lists three Black residents in Huntington Beach. By 2010 the number grew to 1,813, or 1% of the population. I recall a single Black playmate from my growing-up years in the Pacific Sands housing tract near today’s Beach Boulevard and Atlanta Avenue.
According to local lore, the following exchange took place when the family moved in across the street.
“Good morning, how you doing?” the boy’s father greeted a neighbor.
“Fine until now,” the neighbor snapped.
The Times item also documents a less-than-welcoming response by Huntington Beach and Orange County officials. “Objections raised by various organizations,” it relates, led to the Pacific Electric and Southern Pacific rail lines “refusing access across their tracks.”
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It was the first of many obstructions and technicalities that white residents would throw up over the next year and a half.
Still, beach club organizers advanced toward their goal as 1925 progressed. Buildings rose on 7 acres at today’s Huntington State Beach. The completed club would have included a dance pavilion for 1,500 guests, a restaurant for 700, a grocery store, a drugstore and a 200-unit tent city, among other amenities.
E. Burton Ceruti, the beach club’s president, was co-founder of Los Angeles’ NAACP chapter. He had already notched victories — notably opening Los Angeles County’s nurse training program to Black students in 1918.
Ceruti had earlier led a drive to expel D.W. Griffith’s 1915 Klan-friendly film “The Birth of a Nation” from theaters. In 1924 he appeared in another Times item filing legal action after Long Beach police allegedly tortured three arrestees.
African Americans were confident on Labor Day 1925 in Huntington Beach. The afternoon saw six-to-10,000 spectators line the sand for a beauty pageant featuring young women from across the region. The “negro bathing beauty parade” was “believed by its sponsors to be the first in the country,” the Times reported.
The event was part party, part promotion for the beach club’s opening — set for Lincoln’s Birthday on Feb. 12, 1926.
A pair of photographs at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture record the excitement, freedom and verve of that long-ago Monday.
For historian Alison Rose Jefferson, who has written about the beach club story, these photographs are culturally important, moving documents.
“The images of the New Negro, their style and beauty, race, class, identity, political assertion, and pride, as well as the Pacific Beach Club site … (form) a visual record of African American … resistance to being ascribed second-class citizenship,” she writes.
The club wasn’t built for all classes — annual fees would run $50 to $80 ($700 and $1,100 in today’s dollars). Excitement spread, though. As editor Fred C. Williams of Northern California’s Public Defender newspaper put it, “Here at last, on the ocean front, we will have one of the most wonderful beach resorts in the world.”
All would go up in smoke on the morning of Jan. 21, 1926. Around 6 a.m., security guard A.H. Sneed spotted flames — and two cars fleeing.
One car sped toward downtown Huntington Beach, another to Newport Beach. Sneed, a “colored watchman” in the Times’ account, got a good look at one man, “who was white.”
The pair were likely Klan members, Cady said in 2006.
“The reason I would say … Klan is because the Klan’s weapon is fire,” Cady told the Orange County Register. “It’s part of their ritual, part of their ceremony.”
Organizers bounced back, however, launching “a national campaign” to raise more money, the Times noted on Nov. 22. Huntington Beach whites mobilized too — with a new organization “to oppose any further efforts of negroes to establish a colony on the ocean front.”
Faced with unrelenting obstruction, however, the Pacific Beach Club dream faded over the next year. It would not join the short list of resorts — like the famous Idlewild in west Michigan — that offered recreation to Black Americans in the first part of the 20th century.
Looking back a century later, the Pacific Beach Club’s brief existence and fiery demise deserve more attention —and a permanent place in the stories of California and the nation.
Erik Skindrud grew up in Huntington Beach. Today he is a writer and editor in Long Beach. He’s @Erik_Bookman on Twitter/X.
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