PRIDE IN LA'S BLACK HISTORY

TOUR POINTS OUT SITES THAT MANY DON'T REALIZE EXIST

Author: By Adam Pertman, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, July 12, 1998

Page: M4

Section: Travel

Most schools don't teach anything about Biddie Mason's life or achievements, however, and her monument isn't listed in most guidebooks about the attractions of Los Angeles. To learn the extraordinary story of this freed slave and businesswoman, you have to reserve a seat on a tour bus.

``I try to show things about the city that people don't even know exist,'' says Kenneth Perkins, who began his Historical Black Los Angeles Tours three years ago, after receiving glowing reports from a group of local middle-school students who traveled to Memphis for a similar excursion there.

``What my tour tries to do is what that one in Tennessee does so well,'' says the 45-year-old travel agent. ``It gives black people pride in a history most of them don't know much about, if anything, and it gives everybody else an understanding that we have a history here at all.''

Perkins estimates that about 1,000 customers, about half of them African-American, have already taken his three- to four-hour tour. He draws his customers mainly from church groups, organizations for the elderly, and schools in the Los Angeles area, but tourists from around the world have also plunked down $27.50 each to see an unusual array of sites.

Clearly, tours that focus on more-famous places in California, like Disneyland or Hollywood or Universal Studios, attract far more people. But there appears to be a growing market for special-interest trips like those offered by Perkins; that's evidenced by the fact that, in addition to those already mentioned, organized tours to black historical sites and related points of interest also are being offered in cities across the country, including New York, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

The majority of attractions that they feature are not stereotypical tourist spots.

Here in Los Angeles, for instance, Perkins takes his groups to Sugar Hill, a small district full of lovely, large houses and mansions -- nearly all of them decaying. This area preceded Beverly Hills as the city's home to the rich and famous, and it became the trendy place to live for wealthy and famous blacks in the 1930s.

On small vans or large buses, depending on how many customers he has (with a minimum of six per tour), Perkins also rides through a three-block piece of L.A. that used to be called ``the Island.'' It's a neat neighborhood of small, wood-frame houses just west of downtown in which a closely knit group of blacks used to live in the late 1800s, surrounded on all sides by whites.

Once Perkins decided to start his tour -- ``a light went off in my head,'' he recalls, when he heard about the middle-school kids who went to Memphis -- he buried himself in libraries, historical societies, and the like to research which sites he wanted to show. ``To be honest, I didn't know if I'd find many,'' he says.

As any good tour operator working around Southern California would, of course, he found out where movie stars and other prominent people had lived. But the homes Perkins takes his customers to see aren't found on the maps peddled in souvenir shops.

In Sugar Hill, for instance, he points out the one-time residences of actors like Butterfly McQueen of ``Gone With the Wind'' and Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Academy Award. A few minutes later, he shows the modest, two-bedroom house where Dr. Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, grew up with his grandmother. Then he heads for the historic firehouse that was California's first to be segregated -- because officials had promoted a black firefighter to lieutenant, but thought white subordinates probably wouldn't work under his command.

``It's just wonderful,'' says Sandra Moodie, a cake artist and children's magazine founder in London. She says that she wanted to take Perkins's tour because, when she recently celebrated her 33d birthday, she had vowed to learn more about her heritage ``and this offers a unique perspective I couldn't find elsewhere.''

Perkins says his objective is to place as little stress as possible on the discrimination that blacks endured, though he does allude to it, and to focus instead on those who saw openings and succeeded despite the odds.

He says that's why he shows so many of the buildings designed by Paul Revere Williams, who became California's first black architect in 1915 and who designed nearly 3,000 structures. Those include the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, the county courthouse, and elegant estates once inhabited by stars such as Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, and Lon Chaney.

He speaks with pride about every stop on his tour -- from the dilapidated home (now being renovated) where the Pentacostal Church of God in Christ got its humble start in 1906; to the Dunbar Hotel in South Central Los Angeles, built in 1928 by a Jamaican immigrant named John Alexander Somerville who was the first black graduate of the University of Southern California. But Perkins makes no attempt whatsoever to disguise which one is his favorite.

``Biddie Mason is my hero, and she'd be a lot of other people's hero, too, if they knew about her,'' says Perkins, who offers the black Los Angeles excursions through his company, which is called KEP Tours and is based in nearby Lakewood. He runs the tours regularly each February, during Black History Month, and periodically throughout the year whenever he can put together a group of at least six.

Mason was born into slavery in 1818, on a Mississippi plantation. As a young woman, she walked behind a wagon train when her owner moved himself and his belongings to Utah, and he brought her to California in 1852. Here, one of her three daughters fell in love with a successful African-American businessman, who instigated a court suit that led to Mason's family being released from servitude in 1856. California was a free state at the time.

Working as a nurse and a midwife, Mason saved about $250 over the following decade and used the money to buy swampy land south of what was then the business center of Los Angeles -- which, Perkins is quick to point out, itself was founded by men of black origins. By the time Mason died in 1890, the three-block area she owned had become the core of the city's fincancial district, and she had grown very wealthy.

During her 34 years of freedom, Mason raised a family that went on to prominence, founded the city's first AME church in her living room, and became a philanthropist.

``I certainly never learned about people like her in school,'' says Ponchita Jubilee-Smith, a longtime resident of Southern California whose college degree was in history. Though she says she is glad people today have the opportunity to visit sites like those Perkins shows on his tours, she adds, ``It would be nice, of course, for black LA to be part of the standard city tour.''

For more information, write to KEP Tours, 5150 Candlewood St., Suite 16F, Lakewood, CA. 90712; or call 213-774-8510.