From slavery to riches: A founding mother of Black Los Angeles finally gets 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, Biddy Mason, who broke free from slavery and built a real estate empire before her death in 1891. 

As the author of the first scholarly biography of Mason, I applaud the decision. 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 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 slaveholder’s wheat fields, tended to his cattle, and delivered babies throughout the colony (while her enslaver collected her fees). 

Black freedom-seekers sometimes sued for their emancipation, 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 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 and inspired other enslaved Black Californians to seek their freedom as well.

Mason 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 — skills she had honed over decades as an enslaved healer. She would go on to deliver hundreds of babies, including children of some of the city’s most prominent citizens.  

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.

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. 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. 

In 1869, she co-founded the 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 bankrolled 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 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. 

But Mason remained largely unknown for more than a century. 

Mason’s memory endures in a splendid art 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 will make visible the geography of early Black Los Angeles and the life of its principal architect.

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.