[music] If you walk down Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles today, you are walking on ground that was bought by a former slave. In a city built by oil barons and railroad tycoons, the most impressive empire wasn’t built by a man with a bank loan. It was built by a woman who walked 2,000 m to get there. This isn’t just a story about hard work. This is a story about a woman who outsmarted her master, outlasted [music] the desert, and use the law to break her own chains.
Let’s get into it. [music] Biddy Mason was born in Hancock County, Georgia on August 15th, 1818. From her first breath, her life was defined by who owned her. She was taken from her mother as a child. She was sold and moved to Mississippi.
She was denied the ability to read or write, but the plantation system couldn’t stop her from learning. Biddy became a master of medicine. She learned the [music] roots, the herbs, and the rhythms of childbirth. By her 20s, she was a highly skilled midwife, valuable to her owners, not just for her labor, but for her ability to keep other enslaved people alive. Before we drift deeper into tonight’s tale, tell me what place are you joining from.
[music] If this narration comforts you, you’re welcome to subscribe and stay with us. In the 1840s, her ownership transferred to a man named Robert Smith. Smith was a Mississippi school teacher who had recently converted to Mormonism. This detail is crucial. Smith wasn’t just a slaveholder.
He was a religious zealot. When the call came from the Mormon leadership to migrate west and build a new Zion in Utah, Smith didn’t hesitate. He packed his wagons. He packed his family and he packed his slaves. In 1848, the caravan set off.
This was the Great Trek. The image we have of the Oregon Trail is romantic. Covered wagons rolling over green hills. The reality was a nightmare for Robert Smith and his family. It was a hard ride in a wagon.
For Biddy Mason, it was a death march. She was 30 years old. She had three daughters, [music] Ellen, Anne, and Harriet. Biddy did not ride. She walked.
She walked from Mississippi through the Great Plains over the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains all the way to the Salt Lake Valley. [music] That is 1,700 m. Her job was to walk behind the wagons and herd the cattle. The dust from the wheels coated her lungs. The heat blistered her feet, [music] and she did this while carrying her infant daughter on her back.
When the caravan stopped for the night, Biddy didn’t sleep. She cooked the meals. She set up the tents. When the women of the camp, both white and black, went into labor on the trail, Biddy delivered the babies. She was the engine that kept the [music] Smith family alive.
They arrived in Utah in late 1848, but the journey wasn’t over. In 1851, Brigham Young, the leader of the church, called for a colony to be established in California. Robert Smith wanted to go, so Biddy walked again. She crossed the burning Mojave Desert. She walked until the dust turned to sand and the sand turned to the fertile soil of San Bernardino, California.
This is where the story turns into a legal thriller. When Biddy arrived in San Bernardino in 1851, she stepped into a paradox. California had entered the Union as a free state in 1850. [music] The state constitution explicitly outlawed slavery. Legally, the second Biddy crossed the state line, she was a free woman.
But Robert Smith was a manipulator. He knew Biddy couldn’t read. He knew she had no money and no connections, so he simply didn’t tell her. He kept her in total ignorance, holding her as a slave in a state where slavery was illegal. For 4 years, Biddy lived in a free state, serving a master who had no right to own her.
But you can’t keep a smart woman in the dark forever. Biddy was working in the town. She was delivering babies for free black families. [music] She met the Rowans and the Owens, prominent free African-Amean families who knew the law. They whispered the truth to her.
You don’t have [music] to stay. Biddy listened, but she was calculated. She didn’t run. [music] She had three children to protect. She waited for the right moment.
In late 1855, the moment arrived, but it came with a threat. Robert Smith saw the writing on the wall. He realized that California was becoming hostile to slaveholders. He knew he was losing his grip on his property. He made a decision.
He was moving the family to Texas. Texas was a slave state. If Smith got Biddy across that border, the door would slam shut. She and her daughters would be enslaved until the day they died. Smith didn’t just pack up.
He tried to sneak out. He moved the entire household into a secluded canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. He posted guards with guns. He told Biddy that if she tried to leave, there would be violence. He was waiting for the cover of darkness to make a run for the border.
Biddy had to act. Her eldest daughter, Ellen, was 17 years old. Ellen had fallen in love with a man named Charles Owens. Charles was the son of the most successful black businessman in Los Angeles, Robert Owens. Biddy managed to get a message to Charles.
We are being taken to [music] Texas. Help us. Charles Owens didn’t hesitate. He rode to his father. Robert Owens rode to the Los Angeles County [music] Sheriff.
This was 1856. A black man demanding that a white sheriff arrest a white slaveholder was unheard of. But Robert Owens had money, influence, and the law on his side. He told the sheriff that Smith was kidnapping free people. The sheriff gathered a posi.
They included Robert Owens and his vakeros, skilled cowboys who knew the terrain. They rode hard into the Santa Monica Mountains. [music] They found Smith’s camp. The cowboys surrounded the wagons. The sheriff drew his weapon and served Robert Smith with a [music] rit of habius corpus.
Biddy and her family were taken into protective custody. [music] They were hauled to the Los Angeles jail, not as prisoners, but for their own safety. The trial of Mason versus Smith began in January 1856. Robert Smith was furious. He hired a team of lawyers to lie for him.
[music] He claimed Biddy and her daughters weren’t slaves. He claimed they were family members who wanted to go to Texas. Biddy sat in the courtroom watching him lie. [music] And here was the problem. Under California’s black laws, a person of color was not allowed to testify [music] against a white person in open court.
The judge, Benjamin Hayes, watched the proceedings. He saw Smith’s arrogance. He saw Biddy’s silence. He knew something was wrong. [music] Judge Hayes did something extraordinary.
He stopped the proceedings. He invited Biddy into his private chambers. Off the record, away from the jury, away from Smith’s glare, he asked her the truth. Biddy looked him in the eye. She didn’t beg.
[music] She simply said, “I have always done what I have been told, but I have been afraid of this trip to Texas.” She told him she wanted to stay. [music] On January 19th, 1856, Judge Hayes walked back into the courtroom. The room was silent. Smith expected to win.
Judge Hayes read his ruling. He stated that because Smith had lived in California for 4 years, he had forfeited his rights to claim ownership over any human being. He looked at Biddy Mason. He looked at her daughters. He declared them free forever.
The gavl came down. The chains [music] were broken. Biddy Mason walked out of that courthouse into the bright Los Angeles sun. [music] She was 37 years old. She had no money.
She had no home. She had just walked away from the only life she had ever known. [music] Most people would have been terrified. Biddy Mason was [music] just getting started. Biddy Mason had won the court case.
But [music] in 1856, a piece of paper saying, “You are free didn’t put food on the table.” She was 37 years old. She was a single mother. She was illiterate. [music] and she was a black woman in a rough, violent frontier town that was still deciding how it felt about race.
She accepted an invitation to stay with the Owens family, the people who had helped rescue her. But Biddy Mason was not a woman who took handouts. She wanted independence. She went back to the only trade she knew, medicine. She found work with Dr.
John [music] Griffin. He was a prominent white physician in town, but he quickly realized that Biddy knew more about healing than most doctors with degrees. She became a familiar sight on the dusty streets of early Los Angeles. She walked everywhere carrying a black bag filled with herbs, roots, and bandages. She was the city’s midwife.
If a Spanish socialite was giving birth, they called Biddy. If a destitute laborer was dying a fever, they called Biddy. She had a strict code. She never refused a patient. If [music] they could pay, she took the money.
If they couldn’t, she treated them for free. But here is the key. She saved everything. For 10 years, she lived on next to nothing. She hoarded her wages.
She lived frugally. She was waiting for an opportunity. In 1866, that opportunity arrived. Los Angeles was still small, basically a few muddy streets. Most people wanted to live near the plaza, the center of town.
Land on the outskirts was considered scrub land. It was cheap because nobody wanted it. Biddy Mason saw what others missed. She took her life savings, $250, and bought a plot of land at numbers 331 and 333 South Spring Street. Her friends told her she was crazy.
They said it was too far from town. They said it was a waste of money. They were wrong. As the years passed, the city of Los Angeles didn’t just grow. It exploded.
and it grew towards Biddy Mason. That scrub land on Spring Street became [music] the absolute center of the downtown financial district. Biddy didn’t just sit on the land. She developed it. She built commercial storefronts on the ground floor and rented them out to businesses.
She lived upstairs [music] with her family. The woman who had once been listed as property on a ledger was now collecting rent from [music] white businessmen. By the 1870s, Biddy Mason was wealthy. Her property was worth a fortune. But she noticed a void in the city.
The [music] black community in Los Angeles was growing, but they had no place to gather, no place to worship. So in [music] 1872, she opened her living room on Spring Street. 12 people showed up. They prayed. They organized.
This was the birth of the first African Methodist Episcopal Church, First AM. Biddy didn’t just host [music] it, she bankrolled it. She paid the taxes, she paid the pastor. When the congregation grew too big for her house, she bought the land and paid for the construction of the first church building. Today, First AM is one of the most powerful and influential black churches in America.
It exists because Biddy Mason laid the first brick. Wealth changes people. Usually, it makes them greedy. It made Biddy Mason generous. She became known as Grandma Mason or Auntie Biddy.
[music] Her door on Spring Street was always open. It acted as an unofficial orphanage for children with nowhere to go. It was a shelter for the homeless. There is a famous story from the 1880s. A massive flood ripped through Los Angeles.
The Los Angeles River burst its banks, destroying the shacks of the poor laborers living near the water. Dozens of families lost everything. Biddy Mason walked into a grocery store in downtown. She found the owner. She called him, “Give these people whatever food and supplies they need.
Put it on my bill.” She didn’t ask for credit. She [music] didn’t ask for recognition. She just paid. She was frequently seen visiting the county jail.
She would bring hot food to the prisoners. [music] She spoke to them not as criminals, but as men. She paid the property taxes for her neighbors who were at risk of losing their homes. She remembered what it was like to be homeless, and she used her fortune to ensure no one else had to feel that way. Biddy Mason died on January 15th, 1891.
She was 73 years old. At the time of her death, she was one of the wealthiest women in the West. Her estate was valued at roughly $300,000. [music] That is millions in today’s money. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Boille Heights.
But then something strange happened. For reasons that history has never fully explained, her grave was left [music] unmarked. For nearly 100 years, the woman who built downtown Los Angeles lay beneath a patch of grass with no name on it. It was an insult to her legacy. It seemed like the city she helped build had forgotten her.
But the truth has a way of surfacing. In the 1980s, members of the first church, the church she founded, realized that their matriarch had no tombstone. They were outraged. [music] They organized a campaign. They raised the money.
And on March 27th, 1988, a massive ceremony was held at Evergreen Cemetery. 3,000 people showed up. The mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, the city’s first black mayor, stood over the grave. They unveiled a granite headstone. It lists her achievements.
But the most powerful tribute is located back on Spring Street. If you go to the site of her old homestead today, you will find the Biddy Mason Memorial Park. There is a concrete wall there etched with the timeline of her life. [music] It documents the walk from Mississippi, the court case, the freedom, the empire. Biddy Mason started her life with a price tag on her head.
She ended it writing checks that saved a city. She proved that you don’t need to be able to read to know your rights. You don’t need to be born free to die a queen. She walked 1700 miles so that generations after her could run. This was the story of Biddy Mason.
Thank you for watching this story on Biddy [music] Mason. I hope you found it insightful. Feel free to leave a comment if there’s a story you’d like us to explore [music] next. And if you haven’t already, subscribe and enable notifications to stay connected. Until the next tale.
Read More: Prairie View A&M vs Southern Highlights | Men’s Basketball | College Basketball 2026
