LA’s Biddy Mason Memorial provides a powerful meditation on race, history and beautiful decay
by Rafiq TaylorIt was a Tuesday afternoon in Downtown Los Angeles when I saw the state of Biddy Mason Memorial Park.
Somehow, I cannot say I couldn’t believe my eyes, and that frightens me a little bit. It’s a common thing, monuments becoming small grottos tucked into the crevices of busy cities. It’s a consequence of time. Do you read the plaque underneath the bench you’re sitting on in the park?
Biddy Mason Memorial Park is in the Historic Core of Downtown Los Angeles underneath and in the back of Broadway-Spring Center. The building itself sports a bold design of its own.
To get to the park, you need to enter the belly of the dark tunnel, walk past the dry cleaners, and then finally reach a commemorative wall, unobtrusively sandwiched between a restaurant and a residential building. Framed on this wall is the story of Biddy Mason, who walked 1,700 miles from Mississippi to Los Angeles in 1848, secured freedom from bondage for herself and her cohort, and became an entrepreneurial engine of the Los Angeles community.
Liberated, she applied her skills as a midwife, delivering hundreds of babies and accruing the funds to purchase a plot of her own and generate lasting wealth: $3 million in 1800s wealth. She applied this to her public service: feeding the unfed, visiting the imprisoned, building a traveler’s aid center, and erecting an elementary school for black children. She even founded the First A.M.E Church, one of the largest churches in the United States that has over 18,000 members.
But there’s another history here, a more recent saga sparked in the 1980s and ’90s. A lingering question over the whitewashing of public memory and what it means to curate a public historical space. Yes, this exhibit is a lasting portion of The Power of Place, a relic of an ever-present conversation sparked by urban historian Dolores Hayden in 1984. The goal of her nonprofit during this time was to create spaces that highlight forgotten places. Through several installations in Los Angeles, equity was injected into urban spaces. I spent a couple of hours examining this single wall.
History doesn’t crave protection — it craves exposure.
Soaking it in, I couldn’t help but wonder: what were we thinking then, and what have we lost? Maybe it has something to do with the general deterioration of the literal materials holding this commemorative wall together, but it feels like a grave site. It feels exposed. Maybe that’s the point. All at once, this place is on the fringes of public memory while still exerting a physical presence. I wonder now, 32 years after the park’s construction, does the city still take notice?
History doesn’t crave protection — it craves exposure. Biddy Mason Park is one of the most exposed landmarks I’ve ever seen. The wall has stains. When I was there, I couldn’t even get a close-up photo of the far corner of the wall telling the end of her story because the very floor it stands on was damaged. Cones and construction tape cordoned it off, with barely anyone around to tend to the reparation. As I said: a consequence of time.
This space is a political anomaly. There seems to be a generalized longing for the political and cultural past in the US, and it’s very often attached to a nationalism that exists more for some than for others. I think there’s something else to the feeling, and I think Biddy Mason Memorial Park, in lingering, speaks to that longing. In a country that is determined to brand itself to the rest of the world as an invulnerable powerhouse, this place is still here. In an era where the lines between nostalgia, capitalism, activism, and performance art become a technologically charged blur, this place dares to continually decay in a corner. On a normal day, this park will be in your periphery. It’s an aged ghost that still haunts all of us. We don’t live with it, but it lives with us. It’s embedded.
If this monument were larger, would it have been renovated or torn down? Would it have been able to integrate itself so firmly as a natural limb of the urban habitat? I’m not sure. It’s quiet. It’s tucked away. You pretty much have to know it’s there to know it’s there. It’s survived by being small. It survived by being the plaque underneath the bench.
Biddy Mason’s legacy unquestionably deserves more than this, and yet this curated space quietly persisting in the shadows suggests a different kind of legacy. If you’re in the area, and you’ve never seen a ghost before, I encourage you to see this one.
Rafiq Taylor is a public relations and advertising master’s student at USC’s Annenberg School. He is an inaugural Charlotta Bass Fellow and an avid podcaster.