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While Los Angeles’s beaches were officially desegregated in 1927, informal segregation persisted throughout the 20th century, either through violence or subtle territorial strategies. African Americans and Latinos nonetheless asserted their “right to the beach” by using diverse tactics, from founding a private beach club to fighting back against their aggressors. In the postwar era, racial minorities were more numerous at the beach and were consequently subject to intense police surveillance – while simultaneously, municipalities attempted to get rid of the last, now shameful traces of racial segregation along the shore. By looking at racial relations on urban beaches, a kind of leisure space that is rarely studied by historians, this article sheds light on the multiple spatial strategies used to contain and exclude people or, on the contrary, to subvert racial boundaries.