The Los Angeles City Council is moving forward with a plan to strip the name "Pershing Square" from the city's oldest park and rename it "Biddy Mason Square." Once that name is gone, it's gone for good, and so is the only citywide memorial Los Angeles ever built for the more than 20,000 Angelenos who served in World War I.

Here's what most people don't know: Pershing Square was never just named for a general. The City Council's own 1918 resolution, passed one week after the Armistice, says the city wanted "to pay tribute to the men of America who aided our Allies" in the war. Pershing's name was chosen as a stand-in for an entire generation of soldiers and sailors. It's been downtown L.A.'s memorial to that sacrifice for over 100 years.

We should honor Biddy Mason. She was a remarkable woman, formerly enslaved, who became one of the first Black landowners in Los Angeles and a pillar of this city's history. But Los Angeles already has a memorial to her: Biddy Mason Memorial Park, built on the actual land she once owned, just a few blocks away. Renaming Pershing Square doesn't add a single new honor to her legacy. It just creates two confusing, competing Biddy Mason sites within walking distance of each other, while doing nothing to fix the fact that her existing memorial is under-signed, under-funded, and easy to miss.

If the city wants to elevate Biddy Mason's memory, the answer is to invest in the memorial that already bears her name, not to erase the one honoring 20,000 veterans to make room.

We're asking the Los Angeles City Council to:

Vote NO on renaming Pershing Square
Direct funding and attention toward improving the existing Biddy Mason Memorial Park
Consider a new monument to Mason within Pershing Square that shares the space without erasing its name

A park name might seem small. But it's one of the only ways a city keeps a promise to the generations who serve and sacrifice: that they will be remembered. If Pershing Square's name can be quietly erased after 100 years, no memorial in this city is really permanent, including the ones we'll one day build for today's veterans.

Sign this petition to tell the Los Angeles City Council: honor Biddy Mason without erasing the memorial Los Angeles built for its World War I veterans.