The car was going through Manhattan Beach, California. A friend was at the wheel. At some point the friend gestured out the window at a stretch of land and explained what used to be there.
“Growing up in California, I was a total beach kid,” Karyn Parsons told Boston.com. “A few years back, I visited a friend in Manhattan Beach. We were driving and she pointed out the property that used to be Bruce’s Beach.”
Bruce’s Beach was a resort. Black-owned, founded in 1912, at a time when almost nowhere on that coastline would sell a Black family so much as a towel rack. In 1924 the city took it by eminent domain.
Parsons had grown up on those beaches and had never heard of it.
That is the sort of gap her entire second career exists to close.
Hilary
For six seasons she was Hilary Banks on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air,” 1990 to 1996, 147 episodes. She was 23 when the show started.
Hilary was the eldest cousin, the one with the shopping bags and the perfect posture and the timing of a stage veteran. It is a very hard part to play well, because a character written to be shallow is usually just written badly, and Parsons made hers land every week for six years.
Then the show ended and she went a direction almost nobody expected.
Sweet Blackberry
In 2005 she founded a nonprofit called Sweet Blackberry.
Its purpose is narrow and clear: bring little-known stories of Black achievement to children. It makes short animated films and books, and it has been doing it for twenty-one years.
The first subject was Henry “Box” Brown, who escaped slavery in 1849 by having himself nailed inside a wooden shipping crate and mailed north. Children’s history is full of the same six names on a loop. Brown is not one of the six, and Sweet Blackberry started there deliberately.
The narrators she got are worth listing. Alfre Woodard. Queen Latifah. Chris Rock. The films have screened on HBO and on Netflix.
She has said, about the early days of it, something you almost never hear a former sitcom star admit out loud.
“I was afraid people would dismiss me, laugh at me.”
The books
The nonprofit led to writing, and the writing turned into the thing she does now.
“How High the Moon” came out in 2019, her first middle-grade novel. “Flying Free” followed in 2020, about Bessie Coleman, the first Black woman to earn a pilot’s license. “Saving the Day” arrived in 2021, about Garrett Morgan, who patented an early three-position traffic signal. “Clouds Over California” came in 2023.
That’s four. The fifth arrived last month.
“Blue Beach”
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers published it on 9 June 2026.
It is set in California in 1929. The narrator is Blue Collins, fifteen years old. Blue Beach is the only beach in Santa Monica where Black families are allowed, and one morning Blue finds the body of a white debutante washed up on the sand.
She panics. So does her friend Ben. Between them they move the body to a white beach nearby, and the suspicion lands on Ben.
That’s the setup, and the reason it works is that it’s a mystery first. A fifteen-year-old, a body, a terrible decision made in ten seconds. The history isn’t a lesson stapled onto the story. It’s the reason every choice in the book is impossible.
And underneath it is the real place. Bruce’s Beach, 1912 to 1924, and the drive through Manhattan Beach where somebody pointed out the window.
Why she stopped acting
She has been direct about what writing gives her that the other job didn’t.
“With writing, I’m doing deep dives into characters and all their complexity — scratching the itch for me that acting did,” she said.
There’s no bitterness in that. She isn’t a former actress with a grievance. She found a version of the same appetite that pays out more, and she followed it, and she has now been running Sweet Blackberry more than three times as long as she played Hilary Banks.
Fifty-nine
Karyn Parsons was born on 8 October 1966. She turns 60 this October.
Twenty-one years of a nonprofit. Five books. A back catalogue of animated films about people most American schoolchildren are never told about.
Hilary Banks is still on television somewhere tonight, forever in her twenties, carrying her shopping bags across a Bel-Air living room. The woman who played her has spent the years since making sure a few more names get remembered.
