Bridget "Biddy" Mason was enslaved in Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina before her Mormon enslaver forced her to walk 1,700 miles to Utah and then to San Bernardino, California, in 1851, despite California having entered the Union the previous year as a free state. When he tried to move her and her family to slaveholding Texas in 1855, free Black neighbors alerted the Los Angeles sheriff, who intercepted the wagon train; because California law barred Black witnesses from testifying against white parties, Mason had to rely entirely on the January 1856 habeas corpus hearing, which Judge Benjamin Hayes decided in her favor, freeing her and thirteen family members a full year before the Dred Scott decision. Mason went on to become one of the first Black women to own property in Los Angeles, co-founded the city's first Black church, and built a fortune she used to fund a daycare center, a school, and relief for the poor, becoming known as "Auntie Mason."