San Benito marking Valley’s first Black community

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San Benito marking Valley’s first Black community

SAN BENITO — On a memorial getting ready to stand outside an old schoolhouse built for Black children, Lonnie Davis is helping etch the names of the families who made up the Rio Grande Valley’s first African-American community. For decades, most of their lives and legacies were forgotten. Now, on a granite monument being made to honor the “Black Pioneers of San Benito,” Davis is helping the San Benito Historical Society inscribe the names of 559…