Biddy Mason

1818 – 1891

Born enslaved as Bridget Mason, she was forced to walk 1,700 miles from Mississippi to Utah and then California with her enslaver in 1851, despite California having entered the Union as a free state the year before. When free Black neighbors in Los Angeles alerted authorities to her enslaver's plan to move her family to Texas in 1855, Mason won her freedom and that of thirteen relatives in a January 1856 court ruling, then went on to become one of the first Black women to own property in Los Angeles and a major philanthropist known as "Auntie Mason."