Bridget Mason spent 38 years in bondage, four of them in California, where slavery was already illegal, and nobody told her.
Mason was born on a Georgia plantation on August 15, 1818, and was brought west by the family holding her. When that household prepared to move again, to Texas, she went to court. She was not able to attend, so the judge who would decide the case met her privately to hear her story. In January 1856, a Los Angeles court freed Mason, her three daughters, and ten other Black women and children held in the same household.
A Los Angeles doctor who had followed the case, John Strother Griffin, gave her work as a midwife and nurse, and she delivered hundreds of babies across the city. She bought property at 331 South Spring Street, built a clapboard house on it, and kept buying Los Angeles parcels that are now downtown.
In 1872 she started a branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in her own front room. It became First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, and it is still open.
Mason died on January 15, 1891. The site of her homestead is now Biddy Mason Memorial Park, and her descendants still come there and talk about her. “I see a strong, tenacious woman who’s persevered through a lot but still has a lot of love in her eyes,” Cheryl Cox said.
