The hidden history of LA’s Underground Railroad

After 170 years, one of the great mysteries of early Los Angeles history remains unsolved: Who initiated the freedom suit that emancipated Biddy Mason and 13 other Black women and children in an L.A. courtroom in January 1856?

The City Council’s recent move to rename Pershing Square for Mason has refocused public attention on her history. Yet we’re no closer to identifying the single figure behind her emancipation, a historic case that broke the back of slavery in Southern California.

I’ll confess, I’ve probably spent as much time as anyone trying to unravel that mystery. As a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, I spent a decade deep in research, resulting in the first scholarly biography of Biddy Mason, The Boundless Biddy Mason: An Odyssey from Slavery to Freedom Across the American West.

Yet it brought me no closer to the truth. My excuse: The 19th-century official court records were either destroyed or lost, while the accounts of Mason’s own descendants point toward different people, in different places.

Only recently did I realize that I’d been asking the wrong questions all along. No single figure was capable of overturning the institution of slavery in California, which had gone uncontested for years, despite the state’s constitutional ban on human bondage.

The only way to understand Mason’s emancipation was to begin, not with a person, but with a network: the hidden history of Southern California’s Underground Railroad.

Proslavery status quo

Southern California and the Underground Railroad are terms not often paired together. The Underground Railroad, after all, is almost exclusively associated with the history of abolitionism in the Northeast. According to common understanding, it was a network of Black and white allies, working in secret, to ferry enslaved people from the South to freedom in the North or Canada.

That’s all true, of course. But those same networks existed in the American West as well. They helped usher Black people from slavery in Texas to freedom in Mexico. And they challenged the entrenched power of slaveholders in Southern California.

Although California had outlawed slavery in its 1849 constitution, that didn’t stop white Southerners from hauling their human property into the state. Perhaps as many as 1,500 enslaved African Americans had been carried into California by the time Mason’s freedom suit came to trial. Black Californians could count on little support from the state’s courts. Nearly every case they tried went in favor of slaveholders.

Whereas most slaveholders made their way to the gold diggings around Sacramento, a sizable colony of Southern transplants settled in San Bernardino, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles. There, they held more than two dozen Black people, including Biddy Mason and her three daughters, in bondage.

Robert Mays Smith, pictured here in old age in Texas, traversed the continent in search of fortune, built on the backs of enslaved people.

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Courtesy Kevin Waite

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By the mid-1850s, San Bernardino was the most prosperous slaveholding settlement anywhere in the American West. And Mason’s owner, Robert Smith, was the single largest slaveholder among them, with 14 people under his control.

California abolitionists challenged the proslavery status quo at their own peril. “The name of ‘black Republicans’ stunk in their nostrils worse than that of a horse-thief,” wrote one Californian of his violently anti-abolitionist neighbors. As the future U.S. Sen. John Conness recalled: “If any man could be found who had temerity enough to believe it [slavery] was a bad system, and his opinions became known, he was proscribed, clubbed, or shot, according to the pleasure of the ruffians who dominated public opinion” in California.

The politics of slavery became a matter of life and death in Los Angeles. In 1851, L.A.’s marshal discovered that a local slaveholder had been whipping a Black man in the courtyard of his adobe home. When the marshal attempted to intervene, he was confronted by a group of vigilantes. “They told me that I was required to leave the city within the space of 24 hours, at my peril,” he later reported in court records, “which I distinctly understood to mean the peril of my life.” The marshal departed the next morning for San Francisco.

“Mob Law,” lamented the Los Angeles mayor, “is triumphant as respects the existence of negro slavery in this district.”

Refuge for Black freedom-seekers

That didn’t dissuade Robert and Winnie Owens, two of the earliest Black settlers in Los Angeles. They knew as well as anyone that freedom often came at great personal sacrifice. They had been enslaved in Texas but managed to purchase their freedom and make their way west with their children. In Los Angeles, they formed the early core of the region’s Underground Railroad.

The San Pedro Street home (right) of Robert and Winnie Owens, a key site on the Underground Railroad of Southern California.

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C.C. Pierce Collection of Photographs, the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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They turned their adobe home on San Pedro Street into a refuge for Black freedom-seekers. “Many slave owners have claimed that their property was kept in hiding” at the Owens home, recalled a resident of early Los Angeles in the Los Angeles Herald. In one instance, Bob and Winnie harbored a fugitive woman from her owner, “a drunken brute” from Rancho Cucamonga.

The Owens family did not act alone, however. The enslaved themselves provided the engine for Southern California’s Underground Railroad. Although their actions were circumscribed and their movements policed, they found ways to resist within the bonds of slavery.

Biddy Mason had been chipping away at her owner’s authority for years. In 1849, a Black man named Rande successfully escaped from Robert Smith and made his way to freedom. Mason almost certainly colluded in his escape. Although she couldn’t flee herself as the mother of three young daughters, she could take a vicarious pleasure in depriving her enslaver of his only adult male worker.

Mason’s was a rebellion in slow motion, a campaign built over months and years. In San Bernardino, she began conspiring with other enslaved people. A woman named Elizabeth Flake played a key role in those efforts, according to a later interview with Mason’s eldest daughter. Flake and Mason had formed a friendship through their shared ordeals, including a harrowing overland journey and enslavement in San Bernardino.

Elizabeth Flake (later Rowan), seen here later in life, played an instrumental role in Mason's quest for freedom in 1855-1856.

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San Bernardino Historical and Pioneer Society

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It was probably Elizabeth Flake to whom Mason first turned when she discovered that her owner intended to transport her family to Texas in late 1855. Somehow, they got word to the Owens family and a small network of Black and white allies.

From there, those allies alerted local law enforcement, who then apprehended Robert Smith on the eve of his planned departure for Texas. The largest freedom suit in the history of the American West was underway.

A suit for freedom

Despite her success in bringing Smith to trial, the odds were not in Mason’s favor. The presiding judge was a former slaveholder himself who claimed to “appreciate the kindly attachment that grows up between master and slave.” Mason was prohibited by California law from testifying against her enslaver or any other white person. Meanwhile, Smith or one of his cronies threatened Mason’s lawyer, prompting him to abandon her case. A gang of local rowdies stood at the ready to help Smith reclaim his property “by force.”

As her case rapidly deteriorated, Mason turned once more to her allies. The Owens family harbored Mason and many of the enslaved petitioners, enduring more threats of violence from Smith’s thugs. A white ally, Dr. A.H. Cooper, narrowly escaped a belligerent former constable who threatened to “blow your brains out” for daring to side with the enslaved.

Benjamin Ignatius Hayes in 1849, several years before he would become district judge for Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Diego Counties.

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The Bancroft Library Portrait Collection

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It may have been one of Mason’s allies who convinced Judge Benjamin Hayes to interview her privately in his chambers (thereby skirting the ban on Black testimony). That interview finally swung the case in her favor. Mason’s “glorious instinct of freedom,” Hayes wrote, had lifted a “bright torch” to expose the subterfuge of her enslaver and convinced Hayes that justice lay on the side of the enslaved. On January 19, 1856, he declared Mason and 13 others “free forever.”

Mason’s courtroom victory emboldened other Black Californians to seek freedom for themselves. A wave of self-emancipations in San Bernardino followed. By 1857, the institution of Black chattel slavery in Southern California had ceased to exist.

California wasn’t born free through its putatively antislavery constitution. It only became free after the coordinated efforts of a courageous network of abolitionist allies — the westernmost spur of the Underground Railroad.

So, we may never know who, specifically, initiated the freedom suit that led to Mason’s emancipation. But I’d argue we shouldn’t lament our ignorance; we should celebrate it. Mason and her allies so carefully covered their tracks that neither the judge, nor their enslaver, nor anyone else in Southern California uncovered the full extent of their abolitionist network. They confound us still.