Who is Bridget “Biddy” Mason ?

In this two-part series, we explore the remarkable life of the woman who build Black Los Angeles.

3 min readJul 3, 2022

Part I: Long Road to Freedom

If you are from Los Angeles, you may have heard of one of the city’s pioneers: Bridget “Biddy” Mason (1818–1891).

Bridget “Biddy” Mason, USC Digital Library, California Historical Society Collection.

Biddy was born in Hancock County, Georgia and was soon purchased by Robert Smith and his wife Rebecca. While enslaved in the Smith household, Biddy met another woman named Hannah Embers, who had been Rebecca’s childhood slave. Biddy and Hannah formed a special bond that helped give them the strength to endure the cruel treatment — physical and mental—they faced at the hands of Robert Smith.

In the 1840s, the Smiths converted to Mormonism and moved Biddy, Hannah, their children (likely fathered by Smith), and others from Mississippi to Utah, where they lived for some years before relocating to San Bernardino, California, which was a free state. Their enslavement was not only unjust, but, in California at least, illegal. When Smith attempted to move his household to Texas in 1856, a group of Californians (likely with support from free Blacks in the community) detained them and presented Smith with a writ of habeus corpus. During the trial, Biddy was allowed to plead her case to a judge, and in a landmark legal decision, she and 13 other women and children were freed.

Once Biddy gained her freedom, she settled in Los Angeles — leveraging her midwifing skills to become a well-regarded healer.

WPA Era-mural titled, “History of Medicine in California”, by Bernard Zakheim. Biddy is featured front-and-center, working as a medical practitioner.

Part II: Building Black L.A.

Over time, Biddy converted her savings into real estate investments that would build the foundations of the Black community in this burgeoning city.

Biddy’s Homestead on Spring Street in Downtown Los Angeles (now demolished).

GUESTS

This episode we speak with folks from the Biddy Mason Collaborative, a group of organizers and historians who have gathered to uncover as much as they can about this woman and keep her memory alive: project co-directors Sarah “Sally” Barringer Gordon, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Kevin Waite, an American history professor at Durham University (and author of West of Slavery); as well as Jackie Broxton, Executive Director of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation and Laura Voisin George, an architectural historian (and PhD candidate at UCSB).

ABOUT US

Urban Roots is a podcast that takes a deep dive into little known stories from urban history. It is an offshoot of Urbanist Media, a not-for-profit anti-racist community preservation collaborative.