The courtroom in Los Angeles is small and hot. A woman stands where the enslaved were not permitted to speak, and a judge is about to decide whether she and her daughters belong to another person or to themselves.
It is 1856.
She does not just walk west. She walks behind a wagon train for roughly two thousand miles, from Mississippi across the plains to Utah and then to California, herding livestock and tending children on foot.
She does not just wait for the law to notice her. She becomes the reason a court has to answer a question, when a Los Angeles judge hears the petition and rules that she and thirteen others held by her enslaver cannot be taken into slavery in a free state.
She does not just earn wages as a nurse and midwife. She saves what she is paid, dollar by dollar, until in 1866 she buys two lots on Spring Street for two hundred and fifty dollars, one of the first Black women to own land in the city.
She does not just hold that property. She builds on it, rents rooms and storefronts, sells parcels as the town grows into a city, and turns the ground into a foundation for a family and a fortune.
Her Spark of Liberty was ground that could not be taken back.
Land, in her hands, was not decoration or comfort. It was the opposite of everything her early life had been. She had been counted as property, moved and sold and carried across a continent at another person’s will. When she owned a deed with her own name on it, she owned something the law would defend rather than seize. She used that security to gather her children and grandchildren, to lend money, to feed people during hard seasons, and to help found a church. The builder’s work was literal and also plain in its meaning: put something down that would still stand after you.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
She was born in 1818, most accounts place her birth in Georgia or Mississippi, into slavery. Enslavers held her over the years in several Southern states. Around 1847 the man who claimed her, a Mississippi convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, joined the westward migration, and she made the overland journey on foot, reportedly driving cattle and caring for children along the route. The party settled for a time in the Utah Territory before moving to the San Bernardino area of California.
California had entered the Union in 1850 as a free state. When her enslaver planned to relocate the group to Texas, where slavery remained legal, the matter reached a Los Angeles court in 1856. According to the court record, the judge ruled that she and the others could not be removed and held as slaves, granting them their freedom. She settled in Los Angeles and worked as a nurse and midwife, and by long-told account she assisted at a great many births across the young town, though exact figures are not documented.
In 1866 she purchased property near what is now downtown Los Angeles. Over the following decades she acquired and developed additional real estate as the city expanded, becoming a substantial property owner and, by many accounts, one of the wealthiest Black residents of the region. She was known for her charity, extending help to the poor and to those in need regardless of race, and she is credited as a founding member of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, organized in 1872, with early gatherings said to have been held in her home.
She died in Los Angeles in 1891 and was buried at Evergreen Cemetery, for many years in an unmarked grave. Nearly a century later, in 1988, city officials and church members dedicated a headstone and marked her legacy with a memorial. A wall installed in the 1990s in a downtown park set out a timeline of her life, keeping her name on the ground she had helped build up.
Her name was Biddy Mason.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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