Robert Garcia is Founder and Executive Director of The City Project, a Southern California based non-profit that "focuses on parks and recreation, playgrounds, schools, health, and transit" in order to "enhance human health and the environment, and promote economic vitality for all communities." Over the next few weeks, he'll be sharing his thoughts about the region's national, state and local parks..
"If everybody had an ocean / Across the U.S.A. / Then everybody'd be surfin' / Like Californ-i-a." The Beach Boys.
Beach access is a hot button issue for surfers, social justice advocates, mainstream environmentalists - and property owners who want to privatize public beaches.
It was a condition of California joining the Union that beaches remain public. Nine in ten Californians say the quality of the beach and ocean is just as important to them personally, as for the quality of life and economy of the state. (PPIC survey)
The total economic impact of the tourism and recreation sector of the ocean economy in California in 2000 was over $22 billion. 63% of all Californians make at least one visit to a California beach each year, 2.5 times the national average.
The California Coastal Commission recently approved efforts by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to improve access to beaches, trails, and camping in Malibu. The City of Malibu and residents have responded with lawsuits. This is the latest chapter in a decades long struggle for the right to reach the beach.
The name "Malibu" is derived from the Native American Chumash word "Humaliwo: where the surf sounds loudly."
A Malibu resident demands that city officials vote against public access: "[A]s God is my witness, I will recall every single person I can that votes the wrong way . . . . [Malibu] looks like the most hellacious city I've ever seen in my life. You've told me . . . that you were going to clean up this, this illegal slave operation we have out in front of, of the city hall. We don't even know if they're illegal or not. We don't know who could have been starting fires anywhere." Malibu residents applauded this acerbic message, but tried to drown out advocates who spoke up for public access for all. Malibu Surf Side News
Frederick Rindge bought the Topanga Malibu Sequit, a 13,316 acre rancho, for $300,000 in 1892. His widow May spent 25 years to keep the state from building what became the Pacific Coast Highway through the land. By the 1930s, May began selling beachfront lots to movie stars and others to pay her taxes. The parcels carried racial restrictions prohibiting people of color from using the beach, like this one:
[S]aid land . . . shall not be used or occupied . . . by any person not of the white or Caucasian race, except such persons . . . as are engaged . . . in the . . . domestic employment of the owner . . . and said employee shall not be permitted upon the beach . . . for bathing, fishing or recreational purposes.
Reflecting this history, today Malibu is 89% non-Hispanic white, 6% Hispanic, 3% Asian or Pacific Islander, 1% Black, and 0.2% Native American. Nearly 25% of households have an annual income over $200,000. Los Angeles County is only 31% non-Hispanic white. Only 4% of households have an annual income of $200,000 or more. Malibu has 237.85 acres of parks per thousand residents, compared to .25 acres in Maywood, .66 acres in East L.A., .67 in Lynwood, and .78 in Compton. Those are not typos; the disparities really are that dramatic.
The classic 1930 Olmsted report "Parks, Beaches and Playgrounds for the Los Angeles Region" called for public control of the ocean shore and the doubling of public beach frontage.
In the 1930s, the City of Manhattan Beach drove out Bruces' Beach, the only beach resort for African-Americans in Los Angeles County. Today a park commemorates the legacy of Bruces' Beach.
Martin Luther King, Jr., led "wade ins" to integrate public beaches in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1964. Civil rights activists worried that it would take all summer to achieve equal access to public beaches. In fact, the struggle goes on almost 50 years later.
In 2008, a diverse alliance saved the sacred Native American site of Panhe and San Onofre State Beaches. More than 3,000 surfers, Native Americans, politicians, bird-lovers, and abuelitas from East L.A. came together to stop a proposed toll road that would have devastated both. That's what it takes: to realize you can't do it alone, according to Surfing Magazine and Surfshot Magazine.
Rio de Janeiro, like Los Angeles, is marked by some of the greatest disparities between wealth and poverty in the world. Yet Rio's famous beaches are open to all, rich and poor, black and white. The beach in Rio is the great equalizer. California's world famous beaches must also remain public for all, not the exclusive province of the rich and famous.
The article by Robert García and Erica Flores Altodano, "Free the Beach! Public Access, Equal Justice, and the California Coast," in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is available here.
What a crock, you conveniently omit that those very same words were used on nearly every land deed in this state at the same time..and that the language was dealt a blow rendering it ineffective and unenforceable. How interesting that a lawyer like Garcia would take a simple fact and twist, twist, twist it to his own benefit and promotion.
I guess he's just another of the people that rely on government bonds and grants to take from the pie and pretend that he's doing it for 'you and I'.
KCET loses credibility when they allow agenda seekers to lay out their strategy without fact checking or at the least a statement from them clearly outlining that they do not support the antics employed by this group.
Politics of Envy at work here, and he's a pro at that game.
Thanks for your comments.
I would like to address your concerns about racially restrictive covenants.
1. Actually the racially restrictive housing covenants in Malibu were quite distinctive, and that is why we quote it: they prevented people of color not only from buying or renting land, the covenants went further and purported to prevent employees of color from using even public beaches. Such covenants on private land prohibiting people of color from using *public land* were not in fact "used on nearly every land deed in this state at the same time," as you incorrectly claim.
2. Indeed, you are incorrect that racially restrictive housing covenants were "used on nearly every land deed in this state at the same time." They were used only in communities that kept out people of color. Boyle Heights, for example, was a diverse community in Los Angeles because there were no racially restrictive covenants there.
3. It took decades to strike down racially restrictive covenants, and the struggle against housing discrimination continues today. The California Supreme court upheld racially restrictive covenants in 1919 and the California courts continued to enforce them until 1947. It was not until the landmark United States Supreme Court decisions in Shelley v Kramer in 1948 and Barrows v. Jackson in 1951 that racially restrictive housing covenants were declared illegal and unenforceable. Even then it took another 16 years until the United States Supreme Court in Reitman v. Mulkey in a 5 to 4 decision struck down California's proposition 14 on the ground that it "was intended to authorize, and does authorize, racial discrimination in the housing market." Advocates today continue to combat housing discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
We focus in part on history because the United States Supreme Court has held that history is relevant to understand equal justice and discrimination. We agree. This includes equal access to public resources such as beaches, trails, and camping in Malibu. And as Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
We do not stop at history but analyze current developments. The video of the Malibu resident is from December 2007, for example, and you can hear other residents cheering on such comments in that video and in other videos from that hearing.
The blog post is by nature short, and that is why we link to the article "Free the Beach! Public Access, Equal Justice, and the California Coast," in the Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, for readers who would like more information.
Thanks again for your comments.