MARCH FOR THE S. TEXAS UNDERGROUND RAILROAD TO FREEDOM

 

By Russell Contreras

Axios

Advocates, historians, and descendants of enslaved people are planning to join a 60-mile walk in Texas to bring attention to the Underground Railroad to Mexico – a lesser-known route that helped enslaved people escape to freedom.

Why it matters: The "Walking Southern Roads to Freedom," scheduled for March 3 to 9 in South Texas, is the latest development drawing attention to a largely forgotten episode of Black/Latino history amid a new surge of research and advocacy around the route.

Organizers say the walk will begin at La Sal del Rey, a salt lake in Hidalgo County, Texas, and pass many historic sites believed to be connected to the Underground Railroad to Mexico. Faith leaders, descendants, artists from Philadelphia and Kansas City, and representatives from the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in Cambridge, Maryland, are expected to join the seven-day march.

Organizers say the walk will begin in La Sal del Rey, a salt lake in Hidalgo County, Texas and go through many historic sites believed to be connected to the Underground Railroad to Mexico.
The event will also include a stop in Mexico to commemorate country's role in the underground walk to freedom. The walk will end in the border town of McAllen, Texas.

The intrigue: The event is a culmination of research by Roseann Bacha-Garza, a program manager for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley's Community Historical Archaeology Project with Schools in Edinburg, Texas. She said the gathering will "increase awareness about the resilience and resolve of freedom seekers of African ancestry who participated in underground railroad-like activities from south Texas to Mexico."

Bacha-Garza said the plans for the walk began after the school received a National Underground
Railroad to Freedom designation for the Jackson Road Church and Martin Jackson Cemetery in San Juan, Texas, from the U.S. National Park Service. Those sites once served as a gateway to Mexico for enslaved people seeking freedom.

The Jackson ranch was located next to another owned by Silvia Hector Webber – dubbed by some historians as the "Harriet Tubman" of the Underground Railroad to Mexico – and her husband, John, who was white. (That's the bill of sale when she was sold in the Missouri Territory in 1819 before John Webber bought her and married her.)

The Webbers built a ferry landing on their property to help enslaved escapees move along the Colorado River toward Mexico, says Ohio State history professor María Esther Hammack.

Context: Historians have known for decades that some enslaved Black people in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama escaped slavery by heading south. Oral histories, archives of slave escape ads, and narratives of formerly enslaved people show that fleeing to Mexico had been a possibility leading up to the U.S. Civil War.

Abolitionists wrote about "colonies" of formerly enslaved Black people popping up in towns across northern Mexico – a country that had abolished slavery in the 1830s.

Yes, but: How many people fled south of the border remained a mystery, and historians debate just how well-organized the network was.

The Plano African American Museum in Plano, Texas, is opening an exhibit on March 6 called "Risking It All For Freedom: Women Who Crafted The Underground Railroad Into Mexico." It is being partly organized by the descendants of Silvia Hector Webber.