Sometimes it’s not about who you are or what you believe, but the color of your skin. That sometimes came two years ago for Mitch Ward. He was sitting at the head of the Manhattan Beach city council ‘ a town that is 89 percent white, according to the 2000 demographic’as its first black mayor.

I’m in the minority up here in more ways than one, he said.

It was the first and only time in his political career he had called attention to the color of his skin.
Nervous laughs escaped from the sea of white faces in the small coliseum looking down at him.
The issue was the naming of the beachside park at 26th Street and Highland Avenue. The history behind it dredged up a racist past the majority of residents and all of the other council members preferred to keep buried. They wanted to call the park something innocuous ‘ Friendship Park, Bayview Terrace Park, Freedom Park. But Ward, he wanted to call it Bruce’s Beach, in memory of the city’s first black landowners.

He kept his hands squared in front of him and chose his words carefully.
He imagined how proud the city’s first black entrepreneurs must have felt when they purchased the beachfront property.
He rejected suggestions of an apology to the Bruce family.

It does nothing for me, he said. It’s meaningless. Give us the name Bruce’s Beach or give us nothing, he said.

Then he called for a vote. Two of the four council members who were against the name-change were swayed by Ward’s speech and the park became Bruce’s Beach.

In less than three weeks America will see its first black presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama on the ballot. When Obama ran against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic Party primary elections earlier this year news outlets and bloggers optimistically predicted the competition would open new discussions on race and gender in American politics.

However, while discussions on gender emerged front-and-center on the political scene, discussions on racial identity have remained submerged. The Republican vice presidential running mate Governor Sarah Palin has made numerous references to lipstick, high-heels and shattering the glass ceiling. Meanwhile, Obama has distanced himself from influential black figures such as Rev. Jessie Jackson and Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In the one famous instance when Obama did confront race head-on, in his A More Perfect Union speech, it wasn’t to open up a dialogue on race, but to defend his association with Rev. Wright, whom Clinton had attacked as racist.

Ward has been a strong supporter of Obama since the start of the senator’s presidential campaign. He has worked phone banks, attended rallies, collected and distributed Obama 08 posters and stickers and campaigned, unsuccessfully, to be an Obama delegate at the Democratic Party convention.

If you’re a person of color you don’t want to focus on race during a political campaign, Ward said. You don’t want to give someone the excuse that you’ve won or lost on race, that you played the race card. You try to win based on reasoning and ideas. It’s bad politics and dangerous to judge someone’s merits based on their race or gender.

However, like many black Americans, Ward has nervously watched as race became a latent backdrop in the national dialogue ‘ insinuated in insults and theorized about by pollsters, who refer to it as the Bradley Effect. The term was coined following the 1982 California governor’s race when Los Angeles’s former, black mayor lost to Republican George Deukmejian, despite leading in the polls. Pollsters theorized that some voters expressed support for Bradley to avoid appearing racist, despite preferring Deukmejian.

I don’t find any fault with the way Obama has handled the situation, Ward said. When I first ran for council in Manhattan Beach in ‘99 some people told me the odds against winning were stacked against me because there were few black people in the city. I debated the 11 other candidates for two seats and when I lost I didn’t feel it was because I was black. And when I won four years later, I didn’t feel that I won because the city wanted to see a black person on council, either.

When it comes to politics in Manhattan Beach, your words, stance on policies, common goals and ideas are what influence people. Of course, no matter where you go there will always be a small percentage who will not be able to get past the color of your skin and that’s when the balancing act becomes difficult. You never want to play the race card, but at the same time you shouldn’t hesitate at the right moment to bring the black perspective to the table.

The black perspective
Mitch Ward grew up on a farm with eight siblings in Emerson, Arkansas, on the Louisiana state line, during the 1960s and 1970s. The town had a population of about 350. He attended a public school that remained segregated until he was in the second grade. His father, who had previously been in the military, was a church pastor who raised Brahman cattle.

Besides the church there wasn’t much civic life for people of race then, Ward recalled.
The stories he heard about his great-grandparents, an interracial couple, sowed seeds of activism in him, though they would remain dormant until later in his life. His great-great grandmother was a slave. His grandfather told Ward how his great-grandfather used to hide information from authorities about the slaves passing through his farm, while providing shelter for the escaped men, women and children behind a woodpile shed.

In the evenings Ward and his brothers and sisters would gather around a big, battery-charged television with a small screen. One life-changing moment he remembers was late into the night when only he and one of his sisters were up, watching black actress Juanita Moore in The Imitation of Life. Moore played the nanny to an aspiring white movie star. In the film Moore’s mulatto daughter is light-skinned enough to hide the fact that she is half black and becomes frustrated with her racial identity.

It was tremendous to see a black actress like Moore on the screen and that inspired my love for theater, Ward said.
While Ward’s passion for the stage came first, his parents instilled in him a strong work ethic that led him to attain a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology and Quantitative Analysis from the University of Arkansas.

Following graduation he moved to New York, where he worked as a technological consultant on Wall Street for a few months out of the year to supplement his income as an actor.

I moved to New York because of the acting community there and it was the place where I could make the most amount of money in the shortest period of time, he said.

Ward joined a black acting troupe called the Harlem Jazz Theater Company, which performed throughout the city, contributing to the dialogue on race through art.
One of the performances was about the life story of Malcolm X, staged at the Audubon Theater where Malcolm X was assassinated.

There were a few people in the area who didn’t want the story to be told and threw a brick through the window during one of our performances, he said. But we didn’t step back from stuff like that.

Through acting Ward got involved with television commercials. Soon an agency picked him up and jump-started his career as a model. He traveled through Europe modeling for fashion magazines and fitting clothes for designer runway shows.

The modeling world is all about the way you look, he said. Every physical attribute about me was put under the microscope, including my race. Some agencies in countries like Switzerland wouldn’t even look at you because you were black. Sometimes you’d get jobs based on the season ‘ they’d hire people of color during the winter to show the summer line, but didn’t want people of color to show the winter line.

Political topography of race
A collection of essays in 1903 by the black intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois entitled The Souls of Black Folk, maps the geography of black-white relations at the beginning of the 20th century. Dubois writes that black Americans must see beyond the veil of racism by recognizing their own socially constructed identity and how this identity is limiting. Du Bois calls this enlightenment double consciousness and advocates a relentless pursuit of education as the way to achieve it.
Around the time of Du Bois’ publication, George Peck and John Merrill were deciding on a name for a beachside town they were building near the outskirts of Los Angeles. A coin flip between the two landed in Merrill’s favor and they called the town Manhattan Beach.
The resort was a popular destination for city bound families, especial during the sweltering months of summer.

Recognizing the need for people of color to get away to the beach, too, Peck sold an undeveloped sand dune to Wilma A. Bruce in 1912. She and her husband Charlie developed the property into a popular dining and dancing resort for black Americans, with and cottages for over-night stays.
According to Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America, by Douglas Flemming, Bruce’s Beach was the first resort on the Los Angeles coast to allow blacks and was a popular destination for over a decade.

But what was popular with vacationing black families was not popular with many of the white Manhattan Beach residents.

Like a lot of America, there was a lot of prejudice towards people of color during that time, said local historian Jan Dennis. The KKK was active in the area and slashed tires and burned crosses.
In 1924 residents petitioned to have Bruce’s Beach condemned and in 1927 the city used eminent domain to evict the Bruce’s and several black neighbors, claiming their land was needed for a park. The Bruce’s sought $120,000 for the property; the city gave them $14,500.

Several months later, 19-year old Elizabeth Cately, a black UCLA student was arrested for swimming in the shore break and thrown in jail in her bathing suit. The event prompted a swim-in by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the NAACP’s earliest acts of nonviolence civil disobedience.

It wouldn’t be until the 1960s, under pressure from the Manhattan Hermosa Fair Housing Coalition, that Blacks began moving back to Manhattan Beach.

As for Bruce’s Beach, the lot remained vacant, littered with glass bottles and cigarette butts until the 1960s when a city employee discovered that if the city did not build a park there the city would have to give the land back to the Bruce family. Green lawns were planted, benches put in, and the name Bay View Terrace Park pushed Manhattan’s embarrassing history under the rug. In the 1970s the park was renamed Culiacan Park, in honor Manhattan’s sister city.

Ward learned of the park’s history after moving here in 1991, when he was given a copy of long time Mira Costa High teacher Bob Brigham’s master thesis about the Bruces.

I learned bits and piece about its history by research and word of mouth and it stayed in the back of my mind, Ward said.

After opening a local IT business, PC Help? Professionals, Ward volunteered for a position as one of the city’s first art commissioners in 1996.

I figured since I had a strong background in arts I could at least offer my expertise there, Ward said.

Although he did not win in his first bid for city council in 1999, he was appointed to city’s planning commission. In his second run for city council in 2003 Ward won a council seat along with incumbent Joyce Fahey. Ward beat out four other candidates by a margin of 10 percent, despite only spending $2,900 on his campaign.

It was his stance on the issues and ability to communicate that stance well that came through loud and clear to the voters, Fahey said about the election. While it was apparent he was the only black council man to run in Manhattan Beach, race never came up as an issue. The only time I heard him to discuss it was when it had to do with an agenda item and he was able to bring a perspective on the subject that was different from any we’d considered.

Ward said when he called attention to his own race during his speech about renaming Bruce’s Beach he was not doing it to guilt trip fellow council members into changing their votes, but to offer his opinion on a topic they might not know too much about.

In most cases dealing with issues in Manhattan Beach there’s no any need for me to bring up the fact that I’m black, he said. But in this case it was relevant, the same way an architect might bring up his or her professional experience when presiding over a decision on a building or a lawyer about a law.

By opening up a discussion about the city’s racial past Ward swayed fellow council members Fahey and Nick Tell to change their votes against calling the park Bruce’s Beach ‘ a moment he felt was one of his most important political accomplishments.

Those council members who voted to rename Bruce’s Beach did not rectify the city’s past wrongs and those who voted against it were not being racist, Ward said. Everyone already won the moment we opened it up to discussion.

He believes the nation as a whole will experience a similar moment when voters step into the ballot booth to select a new president on November 4. ER