Local tour guide Andrea Griego grew up just a couple blocks away from Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights and remembered hanging out with friends on grassy lawns throughout the 67-acre grounds. Boyle Heights residents have long utilized Evergreen as a grave site and a community space. Some visitors pay their respects to loved ones while others walk around its perimeter using a jogging path constructed by popular demand in 2003.
“When I wouldn’t want to go to high school, I would go to the cemetery and would see how old all the names [written on the graves] were,” Griego said, “but I wasn’t interested in the history back then.”
Evergreen was established in 1877 and is the oldest non-denominational cemetery in Los Angeles, making it abundant with local lore and history. Many of the city’s first Black residents were buried here; they were successful entertainers, political figures, and philanthropists.
Griego was invited by Boyle Heights Community Partners, a local non-profit organization dedicated to historic preservation in the neighborhood, to lead their Black history tour last Saturday.
Vivian Escalante, the CEO of Boyle Heights Community Partners, said she’d wanted to host a tour during Black History Month for some time now. “This is to honor our Black history and culture that exists in Boyle Heights today, those that have been forgotten or overlooked,” Escalante said.
Escalante grew up in the area at a time when the city’s Black, Jewish, Asian, and Latino residents could only live on the Eastside due to restrictive housing covenants. Decades prior, many Black Southerners moved to Los Angeles during the great migration in search of financial and social freedom but still contended with local racist policies.
“Boyle Heights was established by the rich diversity,” Escalante said.
Griego led a handful of attendees through the cemetery, carefully walking over grave plaques and navigating a vast network of tombstones to find the graves they sought. In some instances, Griego couldn’t find certain people’s graves because weeds covering their plaques or names on tombstones weren’t legible due to weathering.
The tour spotlighted the successes of several accomplished folks in their respective careers. Many of these people didn’t reside in Boyle Heights but were buried in Evergreen because they contributed to LA’s cultural and political fabric. “Anybody who was anybody was being buried at Evergreen [cemetery] at the time,” Griego said.
Some of those people include Hollywood’s pioneering Black entertainers such as Eddie Anderson, a prominent cast member of the popular radio serial The Jack Benny Show and one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood during the 1950s, and Louise Beavers, a talented actor, and philanthropist who starred in dozens of films from the 1920s to 1960.
Other prominent figures mentioned include Charlotta Bass, a newspaper publisher-editor who helped boost the profile of the Black newspaper The California Eagle, and William Nickerson, a businessman who made a name for himself by selling insurance plans to LA’s Black population.
Attendee Roderick Hunt, who has attended history tours throughout the city, was excited to take part in this tour because of the potential lessons he could learn from studying the past. “I return to history because it can predict the future,” Hunt said. “Everything has its good, bad, and ugly sides, and some people don’t come here because they’ll learn the ugly side.”
While the tour celebrated the accomplishments of Black Angelenos, Griego also made sure to discuss the harsh treatment and racist stereotypes they faced.
Anderson and Beavers became famous for playing racial caricatures of Black servants who catered to the needs of their white bosses, the only kind of roles that were available for Black performers at the time.
Beavers used to host parties at her residence in LA’s former Sugar Hill neighborhood. This upset her white neighbors, who sued to have Bass and other Black residents removed, claiming they had no right to live in the neighborhood due to established racial covenants. Civil rights attorney Loren Miller represented Sugar Hill’s Black residents in this case and won, setting a legal precedent in the U.S.
Bass ran multiple stories in The California Eagle criticizing the presence of the Ku Klux Klan in LA County despite death threats against her. Nickerson founded Golden State Mutual in 1924 to compete against white insurance companies that sold expensive and lackluster insurance plans to Black residents.
“I knew I wasn’t just going to talk about people. I was going to talk about the bigger issues,” Griego said. “If I just talked about them as actors or comedians or like the racist type of characters they played, that’s super one-sided, and they were more than that.”
The tour’s final stop was at the tombstone of Biddy Mason, a successful businesswoman and philanthropist. Jackie Broxton, president of the Biddy Mason Charitable Foundation, shared Mason’s incredible life story with attendees. Mason was born into slavery in 1818 in Mississippi and spent the first couple of decades of her life being sold to different owners until Robert Marion Smith, a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah, bought her.
Smith moved Mason and her children throughout Utah and eventually to San Bernardino, CA, where he hoped to make a fortune with land he had purchased. Mason served as a midwife throughout the arduous, years-long journey. In California, Mason’s eldest daughter Ellen fell in love with the son of Robert Owens, a freed Black man and business owner. Owens hired men to rescue Mason and her daughter Ellen from Smith, eventually securing their freedom.
Once free, Mason moved to Los Angeles and used her midwife skills to earn money. In 1866, she saved enough funds to purchase a plot of land on Spring Street for $250. Mason spent the rest of her life purchasing real estate, using some of her earnings for philanthropic efforts such as feeding the less fortunate, building schools, and helping to found the First A.M.E. Church of Los Angeles. Mason died in 1891, leaving behind a legacy of philanthropic entrepreneurship.
Attendee Laura Navar, a longtime Boyle Heights resident, was moved by Mason’s story and community-building efforts. “She purchased land, but she was philanthropic, she embodied social justice,” Navar said. “I think it’s important to look up Biddy’s story because it’s part of a community where I spent most of my life.”
Escalante said her organization plans to host a second Black history tour at Evergreen Cemetery because they’ve only scratched the surface. “Again, these are important people we should highlight. They are literally here in our backyard, and we should educate the community about them,” Escalante said.
