## First AME: The Church in Her Home
In 1872, sixteen years after her emancipation and six years after her property purchase, Biddy Mason participated in founding the Los Angeles branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — what became First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, the oldest African American church in the city.
The founding happened, according to sources, in Mason’s home on Spring Street. She and her son-in-law Charles Owens organized the initial meetings. The AME Church was a denomination with a specific history in Black American religious life: founded in 1816 in Philadelphia by Richard Allen and other Black Methodists who had experienced discrimination in white Methodist congregations, it was one of the major institutional expressions of independent Black religious and community life in America.
Establishing a branch of this church in Los Angeles in 1872 was not simply an act of religious observance. It was a community-building act. The church became an institution through which Los Angeles’s Black community organized itself, educated its children, supported its members in need, and created a collective identity. Mason’s Spring Street home as the founding location gave the church its initial physical grounding, and her financial support helped secure the church’s first permanent location.
Her financial contributions to First AME extended across years. Sources indicate that she paid the property taxes on the church and covered the minister’s salary during periods when the congregation could not support these expenses itself. This kind of quiet, sustained financial backing — not a single dramatic gift but ongoing underwriting of institutional operations — is the kind of philanthropy that rarely makes dramatic historical narratives but is essential to institutional survival.