She also funded other religious institutions in Los Angeles. Sources describe her paying property taxes for Black and white churches, a form of community support that crossed the racial boundaries of her time. This is unusual and worth noting: a formerly enslaved Black woman supporting white churches through property tax payments in nineteenth-century Los Angeles was an act of generosity that did not follow the usual social logic of its era.
## The Philanthropy That the City Remembered
Mason’s giving extended well beyond the church. The accumulated wealth from her real estate holdings funded a range of community institutions and direct support to individuals.
She founded the first daycare center and elementary school for Black children in Los Angeles. The establishment of educational institutions for Black children in a city where public education was limited and racially structured was a practical response to need: Black children needed schooling, and the public system was not reliably providing it. Mason provided an alternative.
She established a traveler’s aid center. Los Angeles in the 1860s and 1870s was a destination for people arriving from across the country and from Mexico, many of them traveling in difficult circumstances with limited resources. A traveler’s aid center provided practical assistance — food, information, temporary shelter — to people passing through or arriving in the city. This was an institution with a secular humanitarian purpose rather than a specifically religious one, and it filled a gap that formal government institutions were not filling.
Her giving to individuals was direct and undocumented in its specifics, but described consistently in later accounts. She lent money to people who needed it. She gave groceries and supplies to flood victims and others struck by disaster. She opened her home to people who had nowhere to stay. She visited prisoners in the county jail, providing material support and presumably a form of human connection to people who were otherwise isolated.