Los Angeles Metropolis Councilmember Kevin de León just lately launched motions to rename Pershing Sq. after Bridget “Biddy” Mason, who acquired her freedom from bondage in Los Angeles within the 1850s. His effort to reimagine the long-beleaguered public area, which is present process renovations, could also be well-intentioned. However additionally it is disconcerting.
For one factor, Biddy Mason Memorial Park, opened in 1989, already acknowledges her accomplishments at her homestead a number of blocks northeast of Pershing Sq., at Third and Spring streets. Why hasn’t De León thought of different worthy Los Angeles Black settlers who owned property and enterprises downtown in order that extra of the town’s pioneering African Individuals might be acknowledged? Black Angelenos whose tales are much less identified might be honored on the website.
It appears all too doable that De León is pandering to the Black neighborhood, girls and others to make up for that notorious racist dialog amongst metropolis leaders uncovered in 2022. Given their redundancy with an present memorial, his efforts don’t appear actually directed at showcasing Los Angeles’ ignored histories and historic figures.
Take, as an illustration, Robert and Winnie Owens and their youngsters, Sarah, Martha and Charles, who have been additionally outstanding previously enslaved individuals and have but to be appropriately acknowledged by the town. Robert Owens bought his and his household’s freedom from bondage, and so they migrated from Texas to Los Angeles between 1852 and 1853. The Owens household owned actual property and a livery enterprise and supplied different enterprise companies in Los Angeles. By the point the formidable Robert Owens died, in 1865, he was thought of the wealthiest African American in Los Angeles County.
This household — together with Los Angeles’ Manuel Pepper and San Bernardino County’s Elizabeth Rowan, each African American, and some white allies — helped Mason, her youngsters and members of her prolonged household escape enslavement in 1856. Mason and her youngsters, Ellen, Ann and Harriett, initially lived with the Owens household as newly free individuals in Los Angeles whereas forming a relationship with their adopted neighborhood. This helped the elder Mason develop her profitable midwife apply. She finally grew to become the primary African American lady who was a sole proprietor of actual property she bought. Biddy Mason’s daughter Ellen married Charles Owens, merging the 2 households.
Louis (or Lewis) Inexperienced, a barber who held different occupations in his lifetime, is one other Black Angeleno pioneer worthy of broader recognition in our civic reminiscence. After he overcame racist subterfuge by white locals, Inexperienced grew to become the first African American to register to vote in Los Angeles County in 1870, the yr the fifteenth Modification prolonged voting rights to Black males.
Biddy Mason Memorial Park was among the many first important efforts to acknowledge the histories of working individuals and communities of coloration in Los Angeles’ public areas. Created by the nonprofit group the Energy of Place, the venture was a results of years of historic analysis, neighborhood engagement, collaboration, wrangling over allowing and coverage and preventing with dismissive metropolis leaders. Thirty years later, in 2019, when then-Mayor Eric Garcetti convened advisors, historians, cultural critics and designers because the Civic Reminiscence Working Group, the Energy of Place initiative remained an essential touchstone.
But it appears too simply forgotten. In proposing to rename Pershing Sq. for Biddy Mason, De León has derided the Memorial Park, which is in his district, as darkish and secluded. It’s unclear if or how he intends to repair that.
Town appears to have finished little to maintain Biddy Mason Memorial Park. There are not any huge entrance indicators; two small steel plaques on Spring and Third Streets, each defaced, provide no directional steering. The lighting and seating don’t invite guests to have a look at the weathered commemorative options, that are overdue for rehabilitation. These embody “Biddy Mason’s Time and Place,” designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, a commemorative wall with imprints and artifacts of Mason’s life and occasions. Adjoining to it’s “Biddy Mason: Home of the Open Hand,” by the famend Los Angeles-based African American artist Betye Saar, whose set up affords a glimpse of what Mason’s house seemed like primarily based on historic pictures.
Town has lengthy lacked a course of and insurance policies for addressing commemorative websites. The Mayor’s Civic Reminiscence Working Group was fashioned to deal with this hole. In a 2022 report by the group, then-Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne wrote a “chief lesson” is that “broad-based discussions about memorialization and commemoration” are wanted, and that “Los Angeles has not but engaged in that dialog to the diploma it must, particularly in the case of initiatives launched from Metropolis Corridor.”
L.A. must rethink civic reminiscence past renaming locations, eradicating statues and creating new commemorative efforts. This requires extra complete overview and upkeep of previous efforts. The report additionally stresses the necessity for neighborhood involvement, acknowledgment of multilayered histories and an intensive course of involving historians, Indigenous leaders and neighborhood elders.
De León ought to be a part of us in calling on his fellow Metropolis Council members and Mayor Karen Bass to take the steps clearly laid out by the Civic Reminiscence Working Group to honor Biddy Mason and others like her.
Alison Rose Jefferson is a historian, curator, heritage conservation marketing consultant and the writer, most just lately, of “Dwelling the California Dream: African American Leisure Websites throughout the Jim Crow Period.” Catherine Gudis is a professor of historical past and the director of the general public historical past program at UC Riverside, the scholar in residence on the Los Angeles Poverty Division’s Skid Row Historical past Museum & Archive, and a former member of the Civic Reminiscence Working Group.
