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How Biddy Mason crossed the continent, broke free from slavery, and built Black Los Angeles.
Born in bondage, Biddy Mason endured one of the longest forced migrations in American history—three thousand miles on foot from Georgia to California. She and her daughters labored in slavery in the “free” state of California for five years before launching a landmark emancipation suit in 1856. Free at last, she defied barriers of race and gender, rising to prominence as a healer, philanthropist, church builder, and real estate entrepreneur whose commercial properties stood at what became known as the “Wall Street of the West.” By the time of her death in 1891, she had laid the foundations of Black Los Angeles and ranked among the richest women of color in the United States.
In this first book-length biography of Mason, prizewinning historian Kevin Waite uncovers an extraordinary story of survival that carries readers from the cotton South to metropolitan California, and through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the dawn of Jim Crow. By retracing Mason’s odyssey, he illuminates both the continental sweep of American slavery and the fragile, hard-won possibilities of freedom in the West.
Kevin Waite is Anne Stark Watson and Chester Watson Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Texas at Dallas. His first book, West of Slavery, won the 2022 Wiley-Silver Prize and was shortlisted for three other awards, including the Lincoln Prize. His writing appears in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Slate, National Geographic, and The New Republic. Kevin moonlights in the TV and film industry, most recently as the writer and producer of a six-episode docuseries on the American Revolution for National Geographic and Disney+.
“Combining meticulous scholarship with taut, propulsive prose, Kevin Waite tells the story of how the quietly extraordinary Biddy Mason helped break slavery's hold on Southern California. Absorbing and revelatory, this is history at its best.”—Nathaniel Philbrick, National Book Award–winning author of In the Heart of the Sea and The Rush
“Kevin Waite has written the book we’ve needed for a long time. Biddy Mason was a most extraordinary woman. With great care and exhaustive research, Kevin Waite has written her biography as part of the stories of enslavement and emancipation as well as faith and community at the western edge of the United States.”—Kelly Lytle Hernández, author of Bad Mexicans
“In this astute work of historical recovery, Kevin Waite has provided us with a definitive, modern biography of the remarkable Biddy Mason. Richly researched and contextualized in the worlds of Mormon and Western slaveholding, The Boundless Biddy Mason shows how African Americans' struggles preserved the promise of freedom in California, creating a community rich in wealth, Christian philanthropy, and service. In life and in death, Biddy Mason bested her enslaver and left a legacy carried forward by Black Californians until today. Waite's biography is a tremendous achievement and a cautionary tale for our own fraught times.”—Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920
“In the first full-length biography of formerly enslaved California philanthropist Biddy Mason, historian Kevin Waite carefully traces the incredible treks she undertook. The Boundless Biddy Mason is an honest and ultimately inspiring narrative that uplifts Mason’s principles while recounting her struggles in the South and West. Waite’s detailed treatment shows the trials of a ‘slave in a free state,’ whose personal experience of bondage rubbed up against the enslavement of Indigenous people and terrorization of Chinese people in Los Angeles. Despite this backdrop of exploitation, Biddy Mason became a founder and investor who used her wealth to support multiple communities at the heart of a growing metropolis. In telling her story, Waite reveals not only that slavey was a ‘mobile institution,’ but also that Black enslaved and freedpeople took part in the major moments of Western history that are too often told without them.”—Tiya Miles, author of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People
“A truly epic if largely unknown story, at once dispiriting and inspiring, of Biddy Mason's trauma-filled westward journey out of slavery to a precarious freedom, out of poverty to prosperity, out of a desperate struggle to survive and protect her family to a life devoted to building Black Los Angeles. With great learning and beautiful writing, as well as remarkable detective work, Kevin Waite has enabled us to discover Biddy Mason. On this 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, amid what will often be misdirected celebration, Biddy Mason's is a story we should all reckon with.”—Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History