24/12/2025
Mothers are strong đź’Ş
This is an incredible story of endurance, survival, determination, success, compassion and at the route of it all is maternal instinct 🌟💖
She walked 1,700 miles carrying her baby—not toward freedom, but deeper into chains. Then she did something that changed everything.
Biddy Mason spent the first thirty years of her life as someone else's property. Born into slavery in Georgia around 1818, she knew only labor without wages, families destroyed by sale, and the complete erasure of her humanity. She was a possession. A thing to be used.
In 1847, her enslaver Robert Smith joined a Mormon wagon train heading west to California. Biddy, her three young daughters, and other enslaved people were forced to go with him. But they wouldn't ride in the wagons. They would walk. Behind the wagons. For seven months. Across nearly 2,000 miles of unforgiving terrain.
Picture that journey. Through blistering deserts where the sun felt like punishment. Over mountain passes where the cold cut through thin clothing. Through rainstorms that turned trails to mud. Through territories where danger lurked at every turn. Biddy carried her infant daughter in her arms mile after endless mile. Her two other daughters walked beside her, exhausted children trying to survive an adult nightmare.
For seven months, Biddy never stopped walking. Never stopped protecting her children. Never stopped moving forward even when every muscle screamed for rest. The strength required—not just physical but emotional, spiritual, the sheer determination to keep three children alive and give them hope when she had none herself—is almost unimaginable.
When they reached California in 1848, Biddy discovered something extraordinary: California was a free state. Slavery was illegal. The law said she was free. But Robert Smith had no intention of honoring that law. He moved them to San Bernardino and continued enslaving Biddy and her daughters as if California's laws meant nothing.
For eight years, Biddy remained enslaved in a state where slavery was illegal—a prisoner of a man who refused to acknowledge her humanity or the law itself.
Then in 1856, when Smith planned to relocate to Texas (a slave state where he could legally keep her enslaved forever), Biddy made the most courageous decision of her life. She decided to fight.
In January 1856, Biddy Mason walked into a Los Angeles courtroom and did something almost impossible for a Black woman in that era. She couldn't read or write. She had no money, no formal education, no social power. In many places, Black people couldn't even testify in court. But Biddy stood before Judge Benjamin Hayes and argued for her own freedom and the freedom of her three daughters.
She faced down the man who claimed to own her. She faced down a legal system designed to deny her very humanity. And against every imaginable odd, Judge Hayes ruled in her favor.
On January 21, 1856, Biddy Mason and her three daughters walked out of that courtroom as free women. For the first time in 38 years, Biddy belonged to herself.
But freedom wasn't enough. Biddy wanted security, opportunity, and a future where her children would never know bo***ge. She became a nurse and midwife, quickly earning a reputation as one of the most skilled in Los Angeles. She delivered hundreds of babies—for wealthy families and struggling ones, for people who could pay and people who couldn't. She never turned anyone away.
She saved every cent, planning carefully for a future she was building one deliberate step at a time. In 1866—ten years after winning her freedom—Biddy purchased land at 331 Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles. She became one of the first Black women to own property in the city. That simple act—a formerly enslaved woman buying land in her own name—was revolutionary.
That land eventually became worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, making Biddy one of the wealthiest women in Los Angeles. But here's what made Biddy Mason truly legendary: She never held that wealth with a closed fist.
While others built walls around their fortunes, Biddy opened her doors. She fed hungry families from her own kitchen—regularly, feeding dozens at a time. She opened her home to people with nowhere to go, to families newly arrived with nothing but hope. She visited prisoners society had abandoned, bringing food, comfort, and dignity. She funded schools so Black children could learn to read—the education denied to her. She created childcare for working mothers. She paid strangers' grocery bills when she saw them struggling.
In 1872, she helped establish the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles—the oldest Black church in the city, still serving the community more than 150 years later.
Biddy didn't just give money. She gave time, attention, dignity, and hope. When asked why she gave so much away, her answer was profound: "If you hold your hand closed, nothing good can get in. The open hand is blessed, for it gives abundance, even as it receives."
When Biddy Mason died on January 15, 1891, at age 73, she left behind more than property or money. She left schools that educated generations. A church that still serves thousands. Descendants who became professionals and leaders. And most importantly, she left proof of what one person can build when they refuse to accept the world's limitations.
Today, Biddy Mason Memorial Park stands in downtown Los Angeles, honoring the woman who walked nearly 2,000 miles in bo***ge and spent the rest of her life breaking chains for others.
From enslaved to free. From powerless to powerful. From owned to owner—not just of property, but of her own extraordinary destiny.
Biddy Mason walked those miles carrying her baby, protecting her children, surviving the impossible. But the real journey was what she built afterward—a legacy of generosity and unstoppable determination that still echoes through Los Angeles today.
She proved that the truest measure of success isn't what you keep. It's what you give away to lift others higher.
