> Columnist Broderick Perkins
Mason's Realty Investments Funded Early LA Social Work
by Broderick Perkins
In Los Angeles, CA, Nov. 16 is Bridget "Biddy" Mason Day, thanks to a proclamation by former Mayor Tom Bradley. Blocks from the city's financial district, memorials honor the former slave's achievements in philanthropy and social work, financed in part by savvy real estate investments. Biddy Mason Park (#13) at 331 S. Spring St. in a courtyard near South Third Street and Broadway, includes a Sheila Levrant de Bretteville memorial -- an 81-foot long and 8-foot high black concrete time-line wall of Mason artifacts. Nearby, a sepia-toned photomural memorial, "Biddy Mason: House of the Open Hand" by Betye Saar, shows Mason sitting with three other women (likely her three daughters) on the front porch of a neighbor's and close friend's small home. The memorials stand on the site where Mason became a property owner and home owner, perhaps the first black woman to do so, when the City of Angels had a population of no more than 1,000 people. It was from her home that Mason helped found the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1872 and issued a standing order at a grocery store nearby to give free food to any flood victims -- black or white -- after a 1884 rainstorm turned the Los Angeles River into a raging torrent that swept away many homes. But that's not all. "Grandma" Mason, as she would come to be known, created a legacy of selflessness revealed in the Biddy Mason Wall and in her self-taught value of real estate as both spiritual and physical shelter. According to the National Park Service's Cultural Resources, Mason was born a slave nearly two centuries ago, Aug. 15, 1818 on Robert Marion Smith's plantation in Hancock, GA. Mason, with three children, the youngest on her back, walked behind Smith's wagon train for seven months in a move to Salt Lake City after Smith became a Mormon convert in 1847. During the 2,000 mile, seven-month trek, Mason was responsible for herding cattle, preparing meals and midwifery -- for both women and livestock. Years later, Smith moved his household to San Bernardino County, CA where Brigham Young was starting a Mormon community, but Smith soon discovered California was a free state where holding slaves was illegal. Seeking to retain his slaves, Smith decided to depart for Texas which was still a slave state, but free blacks Elizabeth Flake Rowan, Charles Owens, and his father, Robert Owens, who ran a flourishing stable on San Pedro Street, formed a posse of vaqueros to rescue the Masons, according to "The African American Experience: A History Of Black Americans From 1619 to 1890," by Quintard Taylor, a history professor at the University of Washington. In 1856, a writ of habeas corpus freed the 38-year-old Mason and her family and they later moved in with the Owens. One of only four physicians in Los Angeles at the time offered Mason work as a midwife and nurse and by 1866 she had delivered hundreds of babies and nursed many people, including -- at her own risk -- patients during a smallpox epidemic, according to California Social Work Hall of Distinction. The Historical Society of Southern California says it took Mason a decade of work after gaining her freedom to save enough -- $250 -- to buy land. Research by artists Levrant de Bretteville and Saar, "Biddy Mason's Place: A Passage of Time" reveals Mason purchased two parcels of land that ran between what is now Broadway and Spring Street, near Third Street, and did not immediately live on the property, but rented a home on San Pedro Street where she established the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1872. "Biddy Mason's Place" reports that Mason later developed the property with a two-story brick building and lived on the top floor, but other historic accounts put her in her own home on First Street, while still others say she had a home at the 331 S. Spring St. location of her memorial park. In any event, by 1884, Mason had sold part of her holdings for $1,500 and over the years accumulated a "fortune" of almost $300,000. Her home became a haven for homeless people and others who needed help, as well as the locus for LA's First African American Methodist Episcopal Church -- the city's first black congregation and now the oldest church in Los Angeles. Mason founded the church -- which offered a food bank and day care -- along with Charles Owen who also became a son-in-law. Real estate investments also helped Mason finance eleven convalescent homes and a school as well as contribute to various charities. Lines of needy people often formed at her home and long before there was a Wheels on Meals she carted home cooked meals to men in state prison. Mason died in 1891 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Evergreen Cemetery in LA's Boyle Heights. It wasn't until 1988, in a ceremony attended by the 3,000-strong congregation of the First AME Church and then Mayor Bradley, was a tombstone unveiled to mark her grave. The following year the city unveiled the memorial at Biddy Mason Park. "Biddy Mason bought her land and built her house in 1866 in a town then so raw and new that the streets were troughs of mud or dust. Gas lamps were individually lit, one by one, every night, by a rider on horseback, illuminating a scant few blocks of humble houses in the bottom of a dark, sloping basin, now the valley of a billion lights," wrote professor Taylor. At least one of those points of light still belongs to Mason. | 
