by Paul R. Spitzzeri
Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of participating in a dedication and ribbon cutting ceremony celebrating the partnership between California Lutheran Homes and Community Services and The Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation in completing the renovation of a house used by the Foundation for its work with youth transitioning from the foster care system to adulthood. It does so through providing living quarters for two such persons, offering programs for them and their families, providing scholarships that have, since 2013, totaled over $700,000, and more.
Part of the work of the Foundation is to share the history of Biddy Mason (1818-1891), an enslaved woman brought to his region from Utah by her Mormon slave-master and who won her freedom and that of a dozen other women and children in a landmark early 1856 court case conducted in Los Angeles. A vital tangible result will be next year’s publication of a book by Dr. Kevin Waite of the University of Texas at Dallas on Mason and her time in the Angel City.
In April 2020, Kevin suggested that Foundation Executive Director Jackie Broxton contact me about taking part in the Foundation’s history project, “The Long Road to Freedom,” and in the 5 1/2 years since, I’ve offered what I can in terms of research on African-Americans in greater Los Angeles during Biddy Mason’s four decades in the region. This has included the “Black Pioneers of Los Angeles County” series of posts on this blog, covering censuses, education, and the activities of residents as they built a small, but vibrant and resilient community in 19th century Los Angeles.
At the event, I was asked by Jackie to be stationed in part of the house to point out displays about Mason and her African-American contemporaries and to answer any questions. The space I was in had one particularly notable display item, which was a copy of a Los Angeles Times article on “The Negro Woman in Los Angeles and Vicinity—Some Notable Characters” appearing a special section of several pages of Black Angelenos in the edition of the paper celebrating the centennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln.
This multi-part post covers the contents of this remarkable set of articles, notable because it was a very rare positive look at the African-American community in the Angel City, whereas most media accounts were negative or, at best, neutral or indifferent. How involved the paper’s publisher, Harrison Gray Otis, or his assistant and son-in-law, Harry Chandler (the subject of an ongoing post on this blog), were in the development of the section is not known, but it is notable to read “The Emancipated,” a first-page piece by John Steven McGroarty (1862-1944).
A native of a small town near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, McGroarty published a poem at age 10, began his journalism career at 19 and published his first book, a volume of poetry, at age 21. That year, he became a justice of the peace and then served as treasurer of his native Luzerne County and he followed these by studying law and was admitted to the bar in 1894. Two years later, he went to work as part of the legal team of Marcus Daly of the powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Montana, though he quickly soured on the industry, including battles between Daly and William Andrews Clark, who was a major Los Angeles figure.
Following Daly’s death in 1900, McGroarty invested heavily in a Mexican mining venture that failed and he moved to Los Angeles with his wife as the 20th century began. The Times soon published one of his poems and he went to work for the paper, including as an editor and a columnist. In 1906, he became editor of the West Coast Magazine, which he ran for almost a decade, but maintained his close ties with Otis and the Times. In 1912, his Mission Play began performances at San Gabriel and ran for about two decades. In the Depression years, McGroarty was poet laureate of California and served in the House of Representatives.
He began his contribution with a poem:
When out of the chaos earth was hurled,
And God’s great mandate spread;
When He made the races to fill the world—
Yellow and white and red—
There was one made black, and the other three
Seeing him, asked to know
Whence, from what darkness cometh he?
And whither does he go?
McGroarty then queried, “what is the destiny of the American negro?” and wondered if Blacks would “survive, or [are they] . . . to disappear as the American Indian is disappearing.” He felt this was apropos given the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, as well as two generations removed from the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.
He acknowledged that persons would answer his questions based “according to [their] faith in the negro or [their] prejudice against [them]” and added, “no one ever seems to think it worth while to ask the negro himself for an answer.” The paper, he continued, did believe it was important and, consequently, “invited the negro people of Los Angeles and Southern California, and the great negro leader, Booker T. Washington,” it may be telling that it was him and not W.E.B. Du Bois who was asked, “to speak for themselves.”
The result, McGroarty informed readers, “is voluminous, and even luminous” as, whatever the experiences of Black people were in other parts of the country, he asserted, their “voice [in the section] is not tremulous with defeat or querulous with despair.” Rather, “it is the voice of a people who have traveled far and well with the vibrant march of progress, and who look out on life with level gaze from victories won.” It was smart, he offered, for African-Americans to “work out their own salvation” and he cited Washington’s statement that “they must make obstacle an opportunity.”
McGroarty then remarked,
As a rule, the white man’s knowledge of the negro is superficial. We know our brothers in black only from meeting them on the highways or from jokes that are printed about them in the comic papers. Sometimes our impressions are gained from none too friendly sources—from those who hate the negro blindly and without reason. This section of today’s issue of The Times—a departure unique in journalism—contains the story of the negroes whom fate has cast in this part of the country. It is their own story told by themselves. The Times has, as it were, invited them to throw open their doors that their white neighbors may look in on them in their family life, their business and professional and social life, and see for themselves how the negro lives and toils and has his being in our own loved California of the South.
The writer went on that he was glad to hear of the paper’s offer because “nothing could be more appropriate or fairer-minded than that a hearing be given to the negro and descendants on this day which must be to them the day of all days on the calendar.” It was, McGroarty averred, Lincoln’s God-given destiny “to strike dead in its lair of horror the beast of human slavery in America.”
He knew of some of the commentary about the so-called “negro problem” and acknowledged that some observers felt African-Americans were “more a problem now than he has ever been since the day his ancestors were kidnaped into America with the first slave ship,” nearly three centuries before. As some essays by white writers in the anthology The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887-1937 by Martha H. Patterson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. make clear, that problem was that Black people in the early 20th century demanded too much and no acknowledgment was made of the remarkable progress of the previous 45 or so years nor of the great need for future opportunities and recognition of fundamental rights.
McGroarty remarked that full voting rights and access to education were considered dangerous by many whites, but he continued that,
If the negros of Los Angeles and Southern California can be taken as examples of the race, it would seem from their own showing of indisputable facts that the “negro problem” has no existence . . . They are engaged in business . . . they are practicing in the professions; they maintain highly organized bodies of Christian worshipers; they have hundreds of good, comfortable homes [though segregated by restrictive covenants] . . . they buy and read books; their children attend the schools and often outstrip their white companions in ability; music and art appeal to them and are fostered and advanced by them; they are good, God-fearing, law-abiding men and women.
Participation in the Times’ section on their community “is the negro’s own answer to the question of his ability to survive and of his fitness to assume a place in modern civilization.” The articles contained therein were an invitation “to visit [them] and [their families], to sit at [their] fireside if it be that you think yourself not better than Christ, to partake of the hospitality of [their] comfortable and generous house[s] . . .” This was done “modestly, though not necessarily servilely” so that, to the paper’s readers, local African-Americans “may render an account of [their] stewardship of freedom to the spirit of the Great Emancipator.”
The piece concluded with McGroarty’s comment that, with Black Angelenos sharing their community’s account, “well may their rejoice and be glad” because “a generation and a half ago they stood in the depths of ignorance, misery and despair,” but, in early 1909 in Los Angeles, “they look from the heights of achievement, of home and of glory.” The writer wished the African-Americans of the Angel City, “good speed them on their way!”
The other feature on this first page was a reminiscence of emancipation by Jefferson L. Edmonds (1852-1914), whose surname, however, was misspelled in the byline, which indicated he was a farmer at Sawtelle, an independent city until it was annexed to Los Angeles in 1922, and a formerly slave. What was not stated by the Times, however, is that Edmonds was educated in Freedmen’s schools after emancipation and taught in Black schools in Mississippi for some fifteen years from the mid-1870s to late 1880s. He was also beaten by white mobs when trying to exercise his right to vote in an election in 1875 and testified to a House of Representatives select committee about his experiences.
Continuing threats against Edmonds and his family, including wife Ida and 10 children, led them to migrate to Los Angeles in 1893 with several years spent in South Pasadena, where he published a newspaper called the Searchlight, and Duarte in the San Gabriel Valley. Edmonds was politically active and a member of various clubs formed during election years, though his allegiance shifted from the Republicans to the Democrats and then an independent organization.
On relocating in 1903 to Sawtelle, where, the prior year, he and his wife acquired five acres near today’s Stoner Park and established a vegetable garden (later leased to Japanese farmers), he launched another paper, the Liberator, which was published for most of the rest of his life. For the special Times section, a large and dramatic drawing was included that showed a Black man on a horse holding a document heralding the emancipation of the slaves with men, women and children coming out of clapboard houses to receive the news.
Edmonds began by stating that, when the first slaves were brought to America in 1619, “only a god could have foreseen the tremendous, far-reaching results” that emanated from the event and he offered “it was, perhaps, God’s way to bring two heterogeneous peoples into sympathetic touch for the civilization and development of two dark continents.” The conversion of African slaves to Christianity was accounted “the greatest missionary achievement in the annals of the last half-dozen centuries” even as “the parties engaged in the scheme were actuated by the most sordid motives that ever degraded the human soul.”
Asking the impact of Black people on American history, the journalist concluded, “if we erase from American history the pages that the negro’s presence caused to be written, it would be a short, uninteresting story,” including, of course, the momentous import of the Civil War. He cited Lincoln’s statement that, if the 150,000 African-American soldiers fighting for the Union had instead been with the Confederacy, the war would have been ended in six weeks.
Edmonds, named for his slave master, then turned to his personal experience on a plantation in central-eastern Mississippi, not far from the Alabama border, and, pondering what was said about emancipation, the young man “began to do what I had never done before—to think” including about freedom and education. When, however, his mother returned at night from the fields and he asked about the possibility of freedom, he related that she looked at him in shock and shook him, telling him “if the white folks hear that they’ll hang you” and the friend who told him the rumor.
Edmonds was made an errand boy, which meant leaving the plantation and going to the town of Crawford, which meant “I lived in a new atmosphere” and that “I saw slavery and much of the country as I had not seen them before.” This included the sheer evil of the “peculiar institution” with the remark that “in the dust of oblivion lies the slave and his unfortunate tormentor; let them rest.”
As for his master, though, Edmonds wrote that he “was kind and indulgent to his slaves” and “kindness and culture were traits of the Edmonds family that radiated from master to slave, from the great house to the plantation, blessing all with whom they came in contact.” He described in some detail the operations of the plantation and commented “it was a system based upon personal integrity and worked so well” that if not mandated by statute, the master would have not had an overseer.
It was added that the master purchased produce that his slaves grew on their own time and that “he owned several wealthy slaves who purchased forty-acre farms in 1867.” A church, with a white pastor and occasional black preachers in his absence, was erected among the slave quarters and “this produced a high standard of morality” among the slaves. Edmonds, however, added, “in spite of master’s solicitude for the welfare of his slaves, they were often victims of outrageous treatment by brutal overseers.”
Moreover, it was observed that “it is impossible to treat a slave kind enough to make him love slavery better than freedom” while “kind treatment increases one’s intelligence and intelligence and slavery cannot dwell happily together in the same soul.” With the outbreak of the war, though, Edmonds wrote that the slaves were fully aware of the possibility of their being freed, though the master expressed confidence the conflict would be over in three months. His sons marched off to join the Confederate army, with one dying at Antietam, as was the overseer, so Edmonds’ father was placed in charge. House servants were able to inform the other slaves of events concerning the situation, which was also affected by the master’s death.
In May 1865, the coachman, who was Edmonds’ grand-uncle, rode quickly to the slave quarters area and, waving his hat over his head, yelled, “Everybody is free! Everybody is free!” What transpired was “one of the most thrilling scenes I have ever witnessed” as farm tools were dropped, slaves hugged and wept and “others rolled over and over in the dust” as all were “seized with a wild frenzy.” He recorded such joyful utterances as “I am free! I am free and I don’t care who knows it” and, as women hugged their children, “You is mine! You is mine! There’ll be no more sellin’ and buyin’.”
After two days of celebration, including from runaway slaves who appeared, some after five years in hiding, Edmonds’ father called for a return to work and a son of the deceased master soon appeared with contracts for sharecropping and saying that the Black people on the plantation were as free as he was. Notably, the writer expressed empathy for the plantation owners and he commented, “I have never met nobler men and women than those composing the family that formerly owned me,” though this also applied to “the slaves with whom I spent my early days.” He concluded,
To take from me the hope of meeting these dear old friends again in that blessed country where breathes no slave, is to deprive me of life’s sweetest aspiration.
Significantly, a falling-out occurred in fall 1913 between Edmonds and the Times over his belief in the innocence of Burr Harris, an African-American man (who was suspected of trying to kill a hotel owner and a woman a half-dozen years earlier) accused of murdering a white woman, but who was then convicted of the crime and executed two years later.
When Edmonds died in January 1914, the Black-owned California Eagle went into detail concerning the funeral service for “the old warhorse and sage of the race.” The paper later remarked that “in the tributes paid the late editor of the Liberator it is a case wherein they loved him for the enemies he made” while it added “while we did not agree with J.L. Edmonds in hardly anything . . . our relations were always friendly and each in our own way fought as we thought best . . . for the uplift of a race.”
We’ll return soon with part two, so check back for that!
There is no doubt that we should celebrate the landmark victory of Biddy Mason’s case in 1856 and praise Judge Benjamin Hayes for his integrity and courage in granting the writ of habeas corpus that secured freedom for Mason and others. Yet, I also deeply question how the legal system can truly function impartially.
Despite California had already been a free state since 1850, and the state constitution clearly declared that all Black people were free, Biddy Mason still had to take legal action to claim the protection that should have already been hers by law, and Judge Hayes still needed great courage to stand against prevailing social hostility. Without enforcement and practice, laws were nothing but printed words on paper. Ignorance, indifference, and failure to enforce justice were the very conditions that allowed slavery to persist.
It’s sad to see that even after Mason’s precedent-setting victory, Black people were not fully protected under the law until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment nearly a decade later; and it took another century, through the civil rights movement, they could finally begin to truly breathe the air of freedom.
Biddy Mason’s case was not an isolated incident. Even today, including at the highest level of the judiciary, we continue to see how legal decisions can be influenced by powerful social forces, deeply rooted prejudice, and widespread opinions.