Biddy Mason

Biddy Mason was born into slavery in 1818 and forced west with the household that held her, to Utah and then to San Bernardino, California. California had joined the Union as a free state, and when the man who held her planned to take her family to Texas, she petitioned a Los Angeles court, and in 1856 a judge declared her and her family free.

She worked as a nurse and midwife, saved, and bought land on Spring Street, becoming one of the first Black women to own property in Los Angeles. She gave generously to the poor, and the congregation that became the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, the city's oldest Black church, first met in her home. On the Los Angeles walk, the narrow Biddy Mason Memorial Park runs along a wall that tells her life as a timeline, on the block where her homestead stood.