The community that gathered in and around her home was drawn from across the city’s Black population and from the broader network of people she had served as a midwife and healer. The women she had helped through childbirth maintained relationships with her. The families she had treated during smallpox outbreaks remembered her care. The people she had lent money to or supplied with food during hard times were her neighbors and her community.
The gathering function of her home was formalized when it became the meeting place for the founding of First AME Church in 1872. But the more informal gathering — people coming by for help, for advice, for the practical assistance that she was known to provide — had been going on since her arrival in Los Angeles. The Spring Street home was a place where people in need could come and expect to be received.
This kind of household — the home as community institution, the woman of the house as a resource for the neighborhood’s most vulnerable — has a long history in Black American communities and in communities of color more broadly. It reflects both the inadequacy of formal public institutions to serve these communities and the compensatory structures that communities built for themselves. Mason’s Spring Street household was one node in a larger informal network of community support that existed alongside and in compensation for the formal institutions that excluded or failed to serve the Black community.
The daycare center and school she founded for Black children were extensions of this household logic into more formal institutional form. The traveler’s aid center extended the same logic to the category of people newly arrived in the city who needed orientation and practical assistance. All of these were responses to the same underlying condition: the formal institutions of Los Angeles in the 1860s and 1870s were not adequately serving Black residents, and Mason’s wealth and community standing gave her the ability to build alternatives.