ALAMO, Texas — Along the winding Rio Grande in South Texas lies a story many have never heard of, that of a southern route to freedom for slaves on the Underground Railroad leading to the Mexico.
“It’s so close, but yet it was so far for so many people,” said OJ Trevino, looking across the river to the Mexican side of the border from his family’s property. “Knowing they just had to make it happen.”
Trevino, who grew up just five miles from the border, was shocked to learn that his fifth great-grandmother had helped escapees cross that river to freedom.
“I come from a Mexican family, but then to understand, they were once enslaved. They helped other enslaved people to freedom,” he said. “It’s a feeling of pride knowing you had a family that did that.”
Nicknamed the “Harriet Tubman of Texas,” her name was Silvia Hector Webber.
Now, new research led by María Esther Hammack, assistant professor of African American history at Ohio State University, sheds light on how Webber achieved freedom and his central role in the Underground Railroad until ‘on the southern border. As the country celebrates Juneteenth – the moment on June 19, 1865, when the Union Army reached Galveston, Texas, to announce that slavery was illegal – Webber’s life is at the center of a exhibition entitled “Freedom Papers: Evidence of Emancipation”. at the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History.
Sofia Bravo, Webber’s sixth-generation great-granddaughter and caretaker of the family land in Alamo, Texas, said this family history has largely remained a secret until now. The discrimination Latinos and black residents face has kept that secret alive, she said.
“It was not allowed for you to know that you were part of a black family,” Bravo said. “They barely accepted you as Hispanic; can you imagine if they found out you were black?
That fear was replaced by pride after researchers discovered Webber’s “Liberty Papers” from the 1830s. The rare document, on display at the Briscoe Center, provides new insight into Webber and her husband, John, who was white.
“Silvia Hector Webber was a remarkable person,” said exhibition curator Sarah Sonner. “We know that his home provided a refuge for the Underground Railroad on the path to freedom through Mexico. We also know the high price she and John had to pay to gain the freedom of Silvia and their three children.
According to the document, Webber’s slaveholders demanded payment in the form of two children – not Webber’s – “a Negro girl three years old…and a Negro boy at least two years old.”
“By paying that, they would have perpetuated the very system they were trying to escape,” Sonner said.
The Webbers never posted their bail and instead lost more than 800 acres of land near present-day Austin that they had put up as security for the freedom of Webber and his three children.
In the decades that followed, they operated ranches along the Colorado River and Rio Grande, researchers say, building ferry landings and providing safe passage for those headed to freedom in Mexico.
“It just shows the fight that she had in her, just the fact that she was not satisfied with seeing the injustice that was happening and saying, ‘OK, we have to do something,’” Trevino said .
Webber’s descendants have since launched the Webber Family Preservation Project to protect his legacy and help other descendants of slaves learn about their history. The family’s uncovered history also gave them a new appreciation for Juneteenth.
“There was a lot more than just physical damage,” Trevino said. “The emotional damage that was done, the generational damage that was done, so having that understanding and learning the importance of what Juneteenth is and what it took to get there, for people to get there and have this appreciation.”
“It took on a whole new meaning and a whole new concept for me,” he said.
To learn more about NBC BLK, Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.
