The Midwife Who Walked to Freedom and Built a Legacy

Biddy Mason walked nearly 1,700 miles behind a wagon train from Mississippi to California in 1851 — still enslaved, herding cattle the entire way. When she petitioned a Los Angeles court for her freedom in 1856, she stood before the judge unable to testify as a Black woman, yet won her case through sheer documented truth.

What Biddy Mason did next reads like Psalm 112 made flesh.

She worked as a midwife and nurse, delivering hundreds of babies across Los Angeles, charging fair rates but never turning away a family who could not pay. She saved methodically, purchased property on Spring Street for $250, and over two decades became one of the wealthiest Black women in the city. Yet her neighbors knew her not for what she accumulated but for what she released. She opened accounts at local grocers so the destitute could eat. She visited prisoners in the county jail. She funded the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, establishing a congregation that thrives to this day.

During a devastating flood season in the 1880s, Mason opened her doors and her purse to every displaced family regardless of race.

The Psalmist writes that the righteous "have distributed freely, they have given to the poor; their righteousness endures forever." Biddy Mason never feared bad news. She had already walked through the worst of it — and discovered that the fear of the Almighty turns suffering into a wellspring of generosity that no hardship can exhaust.