By Kevin Waite, Special for CalMatters<\/p>\n
This commentary was originally published by CalMatters<\/a>. Sign up<\/a> for their newsletters.<\/p>\n Guest Commentary written by<\/p>\n Earlier this month, the L.A. City Council voted to rename Pershing Square<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the author of the first scholarly biography of Mason<\/a>, I applaud the decision. Mason\u2019s story is also the story of Los Angeles\u2019 transformation from a slaveholding backwater to the modern metropolis we know today.\u00a0<\/p>\n The decision to recast Pershing Square as Biddy Mason Park restores her to the heart of the city she helped build.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Mason was one of hundreds of Black people hauled into California by white Southerners over the preceding half-decade.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite California\u2019s constitutional ban on slavery, Mason and others continued to labor in bondage. In San Bernardino, Mason worked her slaveholder\u2019s wheat fields, tended to his cattle, and delivered babies throughout the colony (while her enslaver collected her fees).\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n The presiding judge, Benjamin Hayes, was a former slaveholder who \u201cappreciate[d] the kindly attachment that grows up between master and slave.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n State law prohibited Mason from testifying against her enslaver, or any other white person. Yet when Judge Hayes interviewed her privately \u2014 a legal workaround to the ban on Black testimony \u2014 Mason\u2019s story convinced him to declare Mason, her three daughters and 10 other women and children \u201cfree forever.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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\u2019s most prominent citizens.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n After a fire demolished the buildings she had erected there, she redeveloped the land, transforming the \u201cMason Block\u201d into one of the most fashionable commercial properties in Los Angeles. Mason\u2019s Spring Street development made her into the 19th-century equivalent of a multi-millionaire.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s name was Black-owned.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yet it\u2019s not what she accumulated, but rather what she gave away, that makes Mason so remarkable.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Mason\u2019s philanthropy knew no barriers. She visited prisoners, sheltered migrants and supplied victims of all backgrounds when floods overtook Los Angeles in 1884.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Mason remained largely unknown for more than a century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mason\u2019s memory endures in a splendid art installation: an 82-foot-concrete wall designed by artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville at the site of Mason\u2019s former Spring Street homestead.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s legacy writ large \u2014 inspiring yet sadly overlooked.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>.<\/p>\n This article was originally published on CalMatters<\/a> and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives<\/a> license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Kevin Waite, Special for CalMatters This commentary was originally published by CalMatters. 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