A Conversation with Jackie Broxton, President of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation
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Jackie Broxton (holding sign) and volunteers for a BMCF golf tournament
Bridget “Biddy” Mason’s story could be a movie. Born into slavery in 1818 in Mississippi, she moved to Utah with her last owner, Robert Marion Smith, who helped establish a Mormon community there and brought along his family — and his slaves. As they traveled west, Mason set up camp, cooked meals, herded cattle and served as a midwife. In the early 1850s, Smith decided to move westward again, this time to San Bernardino, California, even though slavery was outlawed in the Golden State. At one point, the L.A. County sheriff caught wind and cornered Smith’s 150-wagon caravan in Cajon Pass. Though this did not immediately lead to Mason’s emancipation, in 1856, she successfully petitioned for her freedom along with 13 members of her family.
In the second act of her life, Mason moved to Los Angeles, where she worked as a midwife and a nurse, diligently saving her money and purchasing land in what would become downtown Los Angeles. In 1866, at the age of 48, she bought her first plot of land on Spring Street for $250. At the time of her death in 1891, she had amassed a $300,000 fortune (some $6 million today). She helped found the First A.M.E. Church of Los Angeles and used her money to feed and shelter the poor and start an elementary school for Black children, among other efforts.
Today, the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation (BMCF), which traces its organizational history back to 2013, works to provide education services through scholarships for current and former foster children in Los Angeles County. Jackie Broxton, a nonprofit sector veteran, serves as president and CEO, and played a major role in getting the foundation off the ground in the 2010s. I caught up with Broxton to find out more about the youth-focused organization, Biddy Mason’s legacy in the annals of Black history and philanthropy, and about Broxton’s hopes for Black philanthropy going forward. Here are some excerpts from that discussion, which have been edited for clarity.
Tell me a little bit about your background. And how did you come to help launch the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation?
Well, I've been in sales most of my adult life. And into fundraising probably for almost 30 years now. I was working for an agency in Pasadena called Hillsides, which cares for foster youth. The agency is a little over 100 years old or so. I would see kids, you know, not being happy. It was a wonderful place at the time. But it doesn't replace a parent or a child’s longing to be with a parent. I’m a member of First A.M.E. Church. So naturally, I knew about Biddy Mason. A group of us got together and decided that we wanted to do something. L.A. County has the largest foster care population in the nation. There are over 30,000 kids in the system. And so we felt that we wanted to do something.
The first thing we did was Thanksgiving dinner on Thanksgiving Day. A lot of agencies celebrate Thanksgiving as far as a week out, because they want to get their staff time off to be with their families. But how are kids ever going to learn tradition if they can't do it when everybody else is doing it? So we did a potluck. It was very successful. The Department of Children and Family Services came in and provided all the rentals.
After the event was over, we were all sitting around rehashing the day and how we could make it better. And there was a kid sitting next to me drawing, because at all of our events we have a craft workshop. He was about 19 years old. I asked if he got his clothes, because we always give away free clothing. But 10 to 15 minutes later he was still sitting there. He said, “Ma’am, I’m just sitting here enjoying listening to you guys talk about real estate.” So after he left, I realized we don’t need to be worrying about who’s gonna bring the potato salad. We need to spend more time talking to kids. I’ll find the money. So that was the start of the Biddy Mason [Charitable] Foundation.
What happened next? How did you go about getting the money?
Well, the next thing we did was a resource fair, where we invited agencies who provide services to foster youth, as well as colleges and university and trade unions. That was very successful. This was back in 2013. We kept doing it. By 2018, I got a call from one of [our] board members who was a judge. And she said she had a friend who wanted to give us $30,000 to award scholarships. Because a lot of the kids we were attracting were 20 years old plus and having trouble getting money to go to school. So that first year, we gave away $30,000. Everyone was happy. But then it was like, what are we going to do next year? One of the board members is an attorney. She raised $30,000 herself. And following year, we were put in touch with this trust. They gave us $40,000 initially. Then $60,000, which took us into 2020, three years ago.
During my time at Hillsides, I connected with a woman named Nancy Ackerman. She called me one day and asked me where I was with this Biddy Mason project. I told her we were giving out scholarships, but still didn’t really have a place. Nancy said that she had just got on the board of the California Lutheran Homes and Community Services Foundation and that she thought they could help — to the tune of six figures. So I went to meet the foundation in Glendale and we had a lovely lunch. They agreed to give us $100,000 to help renovate a church that will house programming, and a $300,000 line of credit. So that's how we wound up in the property where we are now. The trust the foundation was originally involved with gave us a one-time gift of $300,000 to establish an endowment. So since 2018, we have given away a little over $300,000 and we’ll be giving away $83,000 in a couple of weeks.
What is the mission of the foundation? And how does the legacy of Biddy Mason fit in?
Our approach is to weave healing with history. Because when you’ve been in the foster care system, you often don’t trust people, because people promised you things, and then they don’t deliver. And then you don’t know anything about your history, particularly African Americans. The African American population in L.A. County is less than 10%, and yet we make up 24% of the foster care population. So we have a lot of historical information in the house. Biddy Mason is the point that we use to draw people in. But you can learn information about other people here, too. There’s a photograph in the house of African Americans building the Capitol in D.C. And one of the kids looking at it one day said to me, “Jackie, do you mean we helped build the Capitol?” So there's power in having your history. Particularly for foster youth.
Tell me a bit more about your scholarships. Do you have a story of a young person who was particularly impacted by your work?
As far as our scholarships are concerned, those are limited to kids in L.A. County. Sometimes if you’ve been in the system, you’re 30 before you really get your act together and decide what you want to do. We give scholarships [to people] as old as 38. That kind of separates us from a lot of the other agencies.
We had a young man who came to the house a couple of months ago, a caucasian man who spent 28 years in prison, and [had been] in the foster care system. While he was in the system, that foster parent came in the bedroom one night and shot himself in the head in front of both him and his brother. So there was a lot of trauma there. But he eventually decided to go back to school. When he reached out to us for a scholarship, he was at Cal State LA, in his last year. And how he’s at USC, working on a master’s.
Are any of Biddy’s descendents involved with the foundation as well? And what are your sources of funding?
There’s two who are adults, Robynn and Cheryl. We invite them to her birthday party that we do every year. But they have their own foundation that is centered on medical health, primarily in the Caribbean.
Our funding has been primarily from individuals. Locals in L.A. and beyond. I worked as a major gifts director, so I had access. There’s some businesses. But we recently started applying for grant funding this year. There was supposed to be a first fundraiser, but that’s been rescheduled for September 18.
Given that this is Black Philanthropy Month, tell me a little bit about Biddy’s vision of philanthropy and her story. And why isn’t she as remembered as, say, Madam C.J. Walker?
I’m in an international study group examining her life, trying to identify all of the properties that she owned. But my sense of her is that number one was her family. She was dedicated to keeping her three girls together. No slave mother wanted her children to be separated, but particularly because she’d been sold at an early age and never saw her siblings again, I think her paramount concern was keeping those girls together. And then once she started having grandchildren, that concern transferred over to them. But then, because she had experienced so much pain and suffering, she was very sensitive to suffering in other individuals. And I think that drove her philanthropy.
We’re all in this country, orphans to Black history. There are certain people that emerged. But until that movie was made, a lot of people didn’t know about Madam C.J. Walker, either. Because of the way she constructed her business with those beauty schools, she had a strong footprint in the community. But perhaps because Biddy’s activities were primarily centered in downtown Los Angeles, it was different. But there’s so many people that we don’t know about. We’re just scratching the surface, really.
