TRUMP'S WALL THREATENS UNDERGROUND RAILROAD SITE

By Meagan Flynn

The Washington Post
Ramiro Ramirez has been visiting his family cemeteries more often than usual.

Almost every day, he makes the short trip to the two historic landmarks deep in the Rio Grande Valley to pay his respects. 

Both rest just north of the Mexican border, one next to a small chapel that his ancestors built in 1874, the Jackson Ranch Church, and the other fenced in by towering trees just down the road, the Eli Jackson Cemetery.

They mark the final resting places of not only Ramirez’s ancestors, historians believe, but also freed slaves and indigenous people.

The sites represent the last remnants of what was likely once a depot along the southbound Underground Railroad, historians believe — one that was founded by Ramirez’s great-great grandfather, Nathaniel Jackson.

Ramirez keeps returning to visit his ancestors’ graves, he said, because now he and his family fear one day they may not be able to. The reason: Both cemeteries are right in the line of fire of President Trump’s proposed border wall.

On Thursday, Ramirez and numerous groups filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration seeking to protect their various properties from the wall and asking a judge to find the president’s national emergency declaration unconstitutional. 

The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, an indigenous Rio Grande Valley tribe that believes its ancestors are buried in the cemeteries, was among those who joined the lawsuit, which was filed in the District of Columbia. The tribes have been camping out at the Eli Jackson Cemetery since at least January, intent on remaining there if it means facing down a bulldozer, members have said.

The Eli Jackson Cemetery is at risk of falling within the 150-foot “enforcement zone” that adjoins the proposed wall, while the Jackson Ranch Church cemetery is at risk of falling on the south side of the wall, complicating the family’s access.

“I want people to know that there is a lot of important history here that they are not aware of,” Ramirez told The Washington Post in a recent interview.

For more than a century, the Jackson family history was a story passed down through generations only by word of mouth. Then, several years ago, it caught the attention of a group of local historians, who started compiling the archives.

The story begins in Alabama in 1857, when Nathaniel Jackson sold his plantation and freed the 17 slaves who worked on it, according to Hidalgo County Historical Commission reports and interviews with the Jackson family. One of those former slaves appeared to be Jackson’s wife, Matilda Hicks.

In 1857, they piled into a bandwagon with their children and 11 of the freed slaves and headed south, as far south as they could go toward the border, right to the very tip of the United States in Hidalgo County, Tex. They were trying to escape the racial oppression of Alabama, said University of Texas Rio Grande Valley historian Roseann Bacha-Garza, who has studied the Census records and archives related to the Jackson family.

 Down at the border, Jackson and Hicks wouldn’t need to hide their marriage. 

They started a ranch community that, in the age of the Fugitive Slave Act, defied the acute racial animosity that plagued the rest of the nation. Here, mixed-race families on the Jackson Ranch were neighbors with Mexicans, African Americans, the Carrizo/Comecrudo tribe, former slaves and former slave owners. There were Union sympathizers and Confederate soldiers sprinkled into the family tree.

To read the rest of the story, click on link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/03/15/potential-underground-railroad-site-rests-along-border-lawsuit-seeks-protect-it-trumps-wall/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ceb4177c6fd7