The twentieth century recovery of that history — the 1988 gravestone, the 1989 Biddy Mason Day, the de Bretteville installation, the subsequent scholarship and commemoration — represents a process of correction that is still ongoing. The proposed renaming of Pershing Square is part of this process.
The story that emerges from the recovery is not simple. It is not a story of exceptional individual virtue triumphing over adversity, though there is genuine virtue and genuine adversity in it. It is a story of an enslaved woman who survived a two-thousand-mile walk, found allies who helped her use a legal system that was partly designed to exclude her, and then spent three decades building institutions and relationships that outlasted her by well over a century.
## The Judge Who Freed Her and What His Ruling Required
Benjamin Hayes’s January 22, 1856 ruling is the legal hinge on which everything else in Mason’s life turned, and it deserves examination in its own right.
Hayes did something that required him to navigate a genuinely difficult legal situation. He had before him a case in which the person most able to describe what had happened — Biddy Mason herself — was legally barred from testifying against the white man who claimed to own her. He had a defendant who claimed that the arrangement was voluntary. He had a legal framework that did not make it easy to free enslaved people from enslavers who denied wrongdoing.
What he did was use California’s own constitutional foundation. The state’s first constitution, ratified in 1849 before admission to the Union in 1850, prohibited slavery. This was not ambiguous. Smith had brought enslaved people into a state whose fundamental law prohibited slavery and had kept them there for five years. Hayes held that the people Mason and her family were had rights that California’s constitution protected, and that Smith’s attempt to remove them to a slave state to forestall the application of those rights was itself evidence of wrongdoing.