Biddy Mason is finally getting her due. Earlier this month, the L.A. City Council voted to rename Pershing Square in honor of the often-overlooked founding mother of Black Los Angeles, who broke free from slavery and rose to become one of the wealthiest women of color in America by the time of her death in 1891.

As the author of the first scholarly biography of Mason, I applaud the decision. If roughly a decade of research across the libraries and archives of California has convinced me of anything, it’s this: Mason’s story is also the story of Los Angeles’ transformation from a slaveholding backwater to the modern metropolis we know today. The decision to recast Pershing Square as Biddy Mason Park restores her to the heart of the city she helped build.

Born into bondage in Georgia in 1818, Mason survived one of the longest forced migrations in American history— first to Mississippi, then to Utah, and finally to the slaveholding colony of San Bernardino in Southern California by 1851. She walked nearly that entire distance, a total of 3,000 miles or roughly 6 million steps.

Mason was one of hundreds of Black people hauled into California by white Southerners over the preceding half-decade. Despite California’s constitutional ban on slavery, Mason and others continued to labor in bondage. In San Bernardino, Mason worked her owner’s wheat fields, tended to his cattle, and delivered babies throughout the colony (while her enslaver collected her fees). California legal authorities rarely interfered with the institution of human bondage, and when they did, officials almost always sided with slaveholders. Black Californians sometimes sued for their freedom, but lost nearly every case they tried. That is, until Mason and her allies were able to bring their case to trial in January 1856.

The odds were stacked against them. The presiding judge, Benjamin Hayes, was a former slaveholder who “appreciate[d] the kindly attachment that grows up between master and slave.” State law prohibited Mason from testifying against her enslaver, or any other white person. Yet when Judge Hayes interviewed her privately—a legal workaround to the ban on Black testimony—Mason’s story convinced him to declare Mason, her three daughters, and 10 other women and children “free forever.” The decision, on January 19, 1856, was the largest legal emancipation in the history of the American West. Mason’s courtroom victory inspired a wave of self-emancipations elsewhere in the state, which fatally crippled the institution of Black bondage in California.

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But what would freedom mean? The question dogged Mason and her daughters as they stepped out of the Spring Street courthouse and confronted a city better known for mob rule than Black rights. Populated disproportionately by white migrants from the slave states, Los Angeles functioned as a western outpost of the antebellum South, and a particularly lawless one at that. The city had a homicide rate roughly 50 times higher than New York City’s. Most victims were people of color. When the Civil War broke out, hundreds of Angelenos rushed into the arms of the Confederacy, in an attempt to unwind the freedom Mason and her allies had fought so hard to win.

Mason’s unprecedented path to fortune wound through the snares of prejudice and discrimination. She began her post-emancipation career as a domestic worker, earning barely enough to sustain her family. Her prospects improved when John S. Griffin, one of the few doctors in the city, hired her as a nurse and midwife. With a shortage of medical professionals, Los Angeles badly needed someone of Mason’s skills, which had been honed as an enslaved midwife and healer. She would go on to deliver hundreds of babies, including children of some of the city’s most prominent citizens.  

With uncanny prescience, Mason channeled her modest savings into Los Angeles real estate. She purchased her first property at the southern fringes of the city, along Spring Street between 3rd and 4th. After a fire demolished the buildings she had erected there, she redeveloped the land, transforming the “Mason Block” into one of the most fashionable commercial properties in Los Angeles. Mason’s Spring Street development made her into the 19th-century equivalent of a multi-millionaire; the property occupied a core part of what later became known as “The Wall Street of the West.”

During my research, I discovered that Mason owned another substantial plot of land to the southwest. In 1868, she purchased a site bordered by Olive, Grand, 6th, and 7th. Her extended family held multiple additional properties nearby, concentrated along Olive Street. In other words, the area around the square that now bears Mason’s name was Black-owned.

Yet it’s not what she accumulated, but rather what she gave away, that makes Mason so remarkable, and so worthy of commemoration. Her generosity helped build Black Los Angeles and endowed the community for generations. In 1869, she co-founded First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, the first Black church in Southern California, which now has a membership of nearly 20,000. She also helped fund the first Black school in Los Angeles. Thanks in large part to her pioneering work, Los Angeles boasted the highest proportion of Black homeowners of any American city by the early 20th century.

Mason’s philanthropy knew no barriers. She visited prisoners, sheltered migrants, and supplied victims of all backgrounds when floods overtook Los Angeles in 1884. She also provided medical care for Indigenous workers at a time when most Angelenos regarded Native Americans as disposable goods. And she rented her properties to Chinese businesses when other Los Angeles landlords blackballed Asian tenants. Her home was the first port of call for migrants seeking counsel and support, including a young white laborer from North Carolina named Meredith P. Snyder. He never forgot the “kindly cheerful greeting of this good soul,” whose “life was an effort for others.” Snyder would later serve two terms as the mayor of Los Angeles.  

Despite the scope of her journey and the scale of her accomplishments, Mason remained largely unknown for more than a century. A combination of natural disasters, urban development, and simple indifference stymied numerous efforts to honor her memory. In 1972, local leaders converted the former sanctuary of First AME at 8th and Towne into the Biddy Mason Center—only for the building to be consumed by fire later that year. More recently, UC San Francisco removed the first artistic representation of Mason, a stunning WPA-era mural, from a central campus building to make way for a major development project. Despite a spirited public protest, the university shoved the mural into cold storage, where it remains today.

Biddy Mason Memorial Park in downtown Los Angeles, a few blocks away from the former Pershing Square, now Biddy Mason Park. Credit: Don Barrett via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

True, Mason’s memory endures in a splendid installation: an 82-foot-concrete wall designed by artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville at the site of Mason’s former Spring Street homestead. I visit often. Yet only rarely do I encounter anyone else at the site. Screened from street view, the memorial wall has become something of a metaphor for Mason’s legacy writ large: inspiring yet sadly overlooked.

Rather than somehow diminishing the memorial, as some suggest, a renamed Pershing Square will bring much-needed attention to this hidden treasure of Spring Street. Together, the two sites—located on or immediately adjacent to Mason’s major land purchases—will make visible the geography of early Black Los Angeles and the life of its principal architect.

Biddy Mason’s generosity was an antidote to the avarice and inequality of the first Gilded Age. She remains a model as we enter another gilded era of political corruption and corporate greed. Her life’s lesson is as necessary now as it was then: True success lies in what we contribute, not what we amass. Los Angeles has finally embraced a forgotten founder and the spirit that should guide us still.

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Kevin Waite is the Watson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West, which will be published by the University of California Press in October ($10 will be donated to the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation for each copy purchased through this link).

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Primary editor: Talib Jabbar | Secondary editor: Eryn Brown

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