Published May 27, 2026 03:16AM<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
We begin with a story that by now feels overly familiar: A Black man went surfing and he got called the N-word. It was 2021. Twenty-four-year-old Justin \u201cBrick\u201d Howze<\/a> was a beginner surfer then, still learning his way around the breaks at Manhattan Beach outside of Los Angeles when a white surfer unleashed a barrage of verbal abuse upon him and his friend, using the slur repeatedly, as the pair recalled in an Instagram live they posted shortly after. The reel went viral. Howze\u2019s account gained 10,000 followers in just a few days.<\/p>\n The friends organized a Peace Paddle, where at least 200 Black surfers and their supporters showed up. Everyone from the L.A. Times<\/em> to Patagonia reached out to tell the story. But over time, Howze, a DJ and music producer who describes himself to me as \u201ca really unserious person,\u201d grew weary of the earnest articles, the reporters asking him how it felt to be called that<\/em> word.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m like, \u2018This is becoming a white-person pity party,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cThis is boring.\u201d<\/p>\n Howze never meant to be \u201cthe dude who was like, \u2018Woe is me, I\u2019m Black and I\u2019m surfing,\u2019\u201d he says. It wasn\u2019t his personality. Nonetheless, the kerfuffle kick-started Ebony Beach Club<\/a>, the name Howze eventually gave his Instagram account<\/a> and the 70,000-followers-strong community he\u2019s since built around it. His vision: to merge surfing and \u201cauthentic Black culture in L.A.,\u201d or, in his words, to \u201cfuse the fun.\u201d<\/p>\n In April 2022, Howze and Ebony Beach Club started putting on what he called a monthly \u201cbeach bounce.\u201d He\u2019d pull his 1969 El Camino up onto the beach with his DJ setup in the truck bed while two inclusive surf groups, Sofly Surf School<\/a> and Color the Water<\/a>, offered free surf lessons. By September, he says, 5,000 Black beachgoers RSVP\u2019d. Women brought poles to dance on. Gray-haired uncs pulled up on their tricked-out Harleys. The majority of attendees by this point weren\u2019t surfing. But, \u201ceveryone is having the best day of their life,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n The club\u2019s Instagram bio is \u201cThe Black Beach Renaissance,\u201d in part a nod to the original Ebony Beach Club, founded in the late 1950s by entrepreneur Silas White. In Jim Crow\u2013era Southern California, beaches were by practice segregated, so White acquired a lease to purchase beachfront property in Santa Monica in order to develop it into a Black resort. He told reporters he had sold 2,000 memberships when the city claimed eminent domain of the land, a move that White\u2019s family would later allege was racially motivated. White, reportedly devastated, died a few years later, and the lot was sold back to a developer that turned it into a luxury hotel.<\/p>\n Howze doesn\u2019t want to get mired in the past. \u201cI\u2019m not gonna live in what\u2019s already happened,\u201d he says. \u201cHow will we build this world moving forward?\u201d But he also knows it\u2019s important to tell this story, to give context to his community for what they\u2019re doing now. Last Juneteenth, he partnered with Black Lives Matter to throw a party on the Santa Monica Pier near where White\u2019s resort would have been, and stopped the music and dancing halfway through to share the story with roughly 2,000 attendees.<\/p>\n