Mason, Bridget "Biddy"

Impact on the world

Forced to walk roughly 1,700 miles from Mississippi to Utah and then California while enslaved — herding livestock, cooking, and serving as midwife along the entire route — Mason discovered from free Black friends in San Bernardino that California's free-state status likely applied to her; when her enslaver, Robert Smith, tried to secretly relocate the household to slave-state Texas in 1855, Mason's allies alerted authorities, and Los Angeles Judge Benjamin Hayes freed her and thirteen family members on January 21, 1856, in one of the largest freedom rulings in American history. Working as a nurse and midwife who delivered hundreds of babies and became fluent in Spanish, she saved enough to purchase her first Los Angeles property in 1866 for $250 — a plot that would eventually anchor a real estate portfolio spanning what is now the heart of downtown L.A. — and in 1872 co-founded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the city's oldest Black congregation, using her home as a refuge for the poor of every race, a daycare for working mothers' children, and a stop for prison visits and charitable giving.

Life & background

Born into slavery around August 15, 1818, likely in Georgia or Mississippi (records conflict), Mason was enslaved successively in Georgia, South Carolina, and Mississippi before Mormon convert Robert Smith forced her and her three daughters — Ellen, Ann, and Harriet — on the 1,700-mile trek to Utah Territory in 1848 as part of the Mormon migration, and then on to San Bernardino, California, in 1851. She never learned to read or write, signing legal documents with an X throughout her life, but developed expert skills in herbal medicine and midwifery learned from other enslaved women, skills that became the foundation of her post-freedom livelihood. After settling in Los Angeles following her 1856 emancipation, she took the surname Mason and became one of the city's most trusted midwives, working alongside prominent local physician John Strother Griffin; she died in Los Angeles on January 15, 1891, and was buried in an unmarked grave until a 1988 dedication ceremony, attended by thousands, finally placed a headstone at her gravesite.

Sources

1. National Park Service; Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation; HowStuffWorks