Los Angeles has long carried the fingerprints of a woman most residents have never heard of. That is beginning to change.
Earlier this month, the Los Angeles City Council voted to rename Pershing Square in honor of Biddy Mason, a woman who escaped slavery, walked nearly 3,000 miles across the American West, and went on to become one of the wealthiest and most generous figures in early Los Angeles. As the author of the first full-length scholarly biography of Mason, I see this decision as long overdue — not just a tribute to one remarkable woman, but a reckoning with a chapter of California history that too often gets left out of the story.
Mason was born into slavery in Georgia in 1818. Over the following decades she was forced to migrate first to Mississippi, then to Utah, and finally, in 1851, to the slaveholding outpost of San Bernardino. She made almost the entire journey on foot — roughly 6 million steps in total. She was among hundreds of enslaved Black people brought into California by Southern settlers during that era, despite the state’s constitutional prohibition on slavery.
In San Bernardino, Mason continued laboring under bondage, working her enslaver’s wheat fields, tending his cattle, and delivering babies throughout the settlement — services for which her enslaver collected the fees. Enslaved people who tried to sue for their freedom in California courts almost always lost. Mason’s case, however, was different.
In January 1856, Mason and her legal allies finally got their case before a judge, Benjamin Hayes, a former slaveholder himself who had previously written sympathetically about the bond between “master and slave.” California law barred Mason from testifying against a white person in open court, but Hayes agreed to interview her privately — a legal workaround of the era. Her testimony was enough. Hayes declared Mason, her three daughters, and 10 other enslaved women and children free, in what stands as the largest single legal emancipation in the history of the American West.
Freedom, however, did not bring wealth right away. Mason initially worked as a domestic servant, earning barely enough to get by. Her fortunes changed when Dr. John S. Griffin, one of the few physicians in Los Angeles at the time, hired her as a nurse and midwife, work she had learned during her years in bondage. She would go on to deliver hundreds of babies in the city, including children born to some of its most influential families.
With her earnings, Mason began investing in Los Angeles real estate, starting with a parcel along Spring Street between 3rd and 4th streets. After fire destroyed the buildings she had constructed there, she rebuilt, eventually turning the site — known as the “Mason Block” — into one of the most desirable commercial properties in the city. By the standards of her era, she had become the equivalent of a multi-millionaire.
Research for my biography also uncovered a second major property Mason purchased in 1868, a plot bordered by Olive, Grand, 6th and 7th streets — the very land where Pershing Square now sits. Members of her extended family owned additional nearby parcels along Olive Street, meaning the blocks surrounding today’s square were, for a time, largely Black-owned ground.
Still, Mason’s legacy is defined less by what she accumulated than by what she gave away. In 1869, she helped found the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, the first Black church in Southern California, which today counts nearly 20,000 members. She also helped fund the city’s first school for Black children. In part because of her efforts, Los Angeles had, by the early 1900s, the highest rate of Black homeownership of any city in the country.
Her charity extended well beyond the Black community. She visited prisoners, sheltered migrants, and helped flood victims of every background during the devastating Los Angeles floods of 1884. She provided medical care to Indigenous workers at a time when many Angelenos treated Native people with contempt, and she rented commercial space to Chinese business owners when other landlords refused to do the same.
Despite all this, Mason’s name faded from public memory for more than a hundred years. Today, her legacy survives largely through an 82-foot concrete memorial wall designed by artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, installed at the site of her former Spring Street homestead. I visit the memorial regularly, and I rarely see anyone else there. Tucked away from street view, it has become something of a symbol for Mason’s broader story — inspiring, yet largely unseen.
Renaming Pershing Square will not diminish that quieter memorial, as some critics have argued. If anything, it should draw more attention to it. Together, the two sites — one downtown square bearing her name, and one hidden wall marking her homestead — can finally make visible the footprint of early Black Los Angeles and the woman who helped build it.
Original source: CalMatters
