How Pedi Mason crossed the continent, freed from slavery, and the black daughter of Los Angeles.
Born into slavery, Pedi Mason suffered one of the longest forced migrations in American history-three thousand miles on foot from Georgia to California. She and her daughters worked in slavery in the “free” state of California for five years before they filed a landmark emancipation lawsuit in 1856.After finally gaining her freedom, she challenged the barriers of race and gender, emerging as a healer, philanthropist, church builder, and real estate entrepreneur, as her commercial real estate was located in what became known as “Wall Street West.” By the time of her death in 1891, she had laid the foundations of black Los Angeles, and was ranked among the richest women of color in the United States.In this first lengthy biography of Mason, award-winning historian Kevin White reveals an extraordinary survival story that takes readers from the southern United States, where cotton is grown, to metropolitan California, through the Civil War, the Reconstruction period, and the beginning of Jim Crow's racist laws. Tracing Mason's journey highlights the breadth of slavery in America, and the hard-won, fragile opportunities for freedom in the West.
