## A Life Measured in What It Built
Biddy Mason died in January 1891 having outlived the legal institution of slavery by twenty-six years, having watched Los Angeles transform from a small Mexican-American frontier town to a city connected to the continent by railroad and experiencing a population boom, and having contributed to that city’s development in ways that are still visible in the institution she helped found.
First AME Church of Los Angeles, the institution that began in her Spring Street home in 1872, is still active. It is one of the oldest continuously operating African American institutions in California. Its founding in Mason’s home is documented and commemorated. The church’s history connects to the fuller history of the AME denomination and to the particular circumstances of Black community formation in Los Angeles in the period following the Civil War.
The school she founded for Black children, the traveler’s aid center, the lending and direct giving, the sustained tax payments for institutions that could not sustain themselves — these were investments in a community infrastructure that served people Mason would never know, in decades she would not live to see.
What she built was not built quickly or dramatically. It was built slowly, through decades of work that is not easily summarized or commemorated. The midwife’s work is not visible after the fact: the babies she delivered grew up without particular reference to how they arrived. The money she lent, the groceries she distributed, the taxes she paid — these left no monuments. The church she founded is a monument, but it is a collective monument, the product of a community rather than an individual.