Nearly 200 years after the historic battle, Texans are still fighting over how exactly to remember the Alamo.
Officials in San Antonio are preparing to break ground on a $550 million project that will transform the site of the 300-year-old former Spanish mission. In addition to restoring the centuries-old church and convent, a new 100,000-square-foot visitor center and museum, decked out with a 4D theater and a rooftop restaurant, is being built across the street.
But amid all the fanfare, one question has plagued the project for years: Will it fairly and accurately portray the role slavery played in the Texas war for independence against Mexico?
For many in the state, the Alamo is a sacred place where brave revolutionaries were slaughtered by the Mexican army in 1836. For generations, the battle has been used as shorthand for Texas pride. That is how the Alamo should continue to be remembered, some officials say.
If the new museum focuses too much on slavery or other unsavory aspects of Texas history, it may deter visitors to one of the state’s most popular tourist attractions, Jerry E. Patterson, a Republican who served as Texas Land commissioner from 2003 to 2015, said. “If we make it a museum about all the bad things and whatever, nobody’s going to go there,” he said.
But some historians say the story of the Alamo is more complicated than the legend portrayed in movies and it’s time to recognize that preserving slavery, which had been banned in most of Mexico, influenced many of those fighting for independence. Presenting the full history is important to understanding the state’s current racial inequalities, they say.
“Slavery was maybe not the spark of the revolution, but it was the underlying tension that could not be reconciled,”Chris Tomlinson, co-author of “Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth,” said.
The fight over the Alamo comes as the story of America’s racial history, from slavery to Reconstruction, is the subject of a fierce political battle in Texas and around the country. In 2021, Texas lawmakers passed legislation restricting how public school teachers could discuss race and racism in American society. After the New York Times’ 1619 Project launched a national debate over the legacy of slavery and its role in the nation’s founding, Texas lawmakers established the 1836 Project, a nod to the year of the historic battle at the Alamo, “to promote patriotic education and increase awareness of the Texas values.”
The job of the Alamo Trust, which is overseeing the renovation project, and its museum planning committee is to arrive at the truth, said Kate Rogers, executive director of the nonprofit.
“We’re at a time in our country where history can be a hotly debated topic and we’re a historic site so some conflict is to be expected,” Rogers said.
In 2023, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham (R) rode into office promising to protect the image of the Alamo as a “Shrine of Texas Liberty,” against what she described as a left-wing attempt to rewrite the state’s history. In his endorsement of Buckingham, former president Donald Trump said she was running “to protect the great legacy of Texas including defending the Alamo which, like all other amazing institutions, is under siege.”
Among Buckingham’s first actions in office was to request nearly $400 million from state lawmakers for the then-flagging Alamo makeover. The site, the most visited destination in the state with about 2 million visitors a year, hasn’t been updated for decades and is need of major renovations, supporters of the project have said.
“In the past, an average visit to the Alamo was only minutes long,” Buckingham said in a statement. “We’re ensuring a visit to the Alamo is worthy of the significance of the events that took place there.”
Last year, lawmakers approved $400 million to restore the site, which was built in 1724 for Spanish missionaries converting local Indigenous people to Christianity, and construct a new visitor center and museum, which are all scheduled to be finished in 2027.
But even with bipartisan support for the plan, the project has repeatedly been drawn into the state’s culture war over history.
It was nearly derailed after the Alamo Trust endorsed a proposal to move the Alamo Cenotaph, a 60-foot-tall monument honoring those who fought in the famous battle.
During Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the Cenotaph was spray painted with the words “white supremacy,” prompting armed members of This is Texas Freedom Force, a conservative group that the FBI calls an “extremist militia,” to stand guard over the monument.
The Trust and city leaders ultimately agreed not to move it.
There was also a fight over the Woolworth Building, one of three buildings the Trust purchased to house the new museum. Some Black San Antonio residents organized to save the building, which was a key site in the city’s integration of lunch counters during the 1960s civil rights movement. To end the dispute, the Alamo Trust agreed to add a civil rights exhibit to the museum.
The latest fight has been over a planned statue of a man named Joe.
Most aspects of Joe’s story are undisputed. He was an enslaved Black man who was at the Alamo during the famous 1836 battle with his owner, William B. Travis, a commanding officer among the Texas revolutionaries. As one of just a handful of survivors, Joe has gone down in history as the battle’s key eyewitness. When telling the tale he repeatedly referred to being armed during the conflict, according to several historical accounts.
What divided the Alamo Museum Planning Committee, overseen by the Alamo Trust, was whether Joe’s statue should show the enslaved man with a musket.
Displaying Joe armed would falsely give the impression that he and other enslaved Black people fought freely for Texas independence and their continued bondage, some Black committee members argued.
“If his contribution to this battle was he told the story, let’s show him doing that,” said Deborah Omowale Jarmon, one of nearly 30 members of the planning committee.
“But the next thing we know, Joe has a gun now and they’re saying he’s an Alamo defender,” said Jarmon, who runs the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum. “To think that an enslaved person is there willfully fighting for Texas independence is delusional.”
But other committee members argued that including the musket was an important part of adhering to the historical record. Joe himself told others that he was armed, though his motivations for carrying a weapon were unclear, Patterson, the former land commissioner, said.
“By his own words, Joe carried a musket during the battle,” said Patterson, who also serves on the museum planning committee. “The question is what was that for? Was it self preservation, or was he fighting for the Texas Revolution? We will never know the answer, but it’s a wonderful question.”
The committee’s meetings are private and the Trust requires members to sign nondisclosure agreements. News of the fight over the statue of Joe only became public when Jarmon wrote a letter to the San Antonio Express News saying that she was “serving under protest” after the committee initially voted to feature Joe armed in his statue.
Nondisclosure agreements are common in museum planning and the goal is not to limit transparency but to offer a space where members can speak freely, Rogers, the Trust’s executive director, said.
The planning committee recently reached a compromise. The bronze statue, which was modeled after a local college student, will not show the enslaved man armed. Instead, he will be depicted in his role as a survivor of the battle and an eyewitness.
That compromise will honor Joe while remaining historically accurate, Rogers said.
The Trust and the committee are walking a political tightrope. San Antonio and surrounding Bexar County are a blue dot in a sea of red in Texas. About 60 percent of the county’s residents are Latino, 30 percent are White and 7 percent are Black, according to census data. President Biden won it by a nearly 20-point margin in 2020.
Most of the project’s $550 million budget is being covered by the millions approved by the Republican-controlled legislature. State Republicans have called for the new museum to focus narrowly on the famous battle.
The city of San Antonio and other Democratic-controlled local governments are providing about $60 million for the effort, and say the new museum should explore topics like the area’s Native American history and the role of slavery in sparking the Texas Revolution.
“The staff at the Alamo have expressed to me that they want to deal with controversial issues, but I don’t think they’re free to do so,” said Tommy Calvert (D), a commissioner in Bexar County. “Much like we’re in a heart and soul battle for America, we’re in a heart and soul battle for Texas, and the Alamo is at the center of that.”
Patterson acknowledges that Texas has long held on to a sanitized version of history. Growing up, his view of the Alamo and Texas independence was influenced by movies like Disney’s “Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier” and the 1960 film “The Alamo,” starring John Wayne, he said.
“The bottom line is for about 100 years, Texas taught, believed and supported a narrative of history that was not completely factually accurate and did not include all players that needed to be included,” he said.
But some people are trying to force an overcorrection, Patterson said.
“The undercurrent here is not so much about the Alamo, it’s about those who believe that the 1836 rebellion of Texas was about slavery and candidly, that is” wrong, he said.
Texans fighting for independence didn’t believe slavery was at risk, Patterson said, noting that other non-slave Mexican states were also in rebellion. The Texas Declaration of Independence did not mention slavery among its grievances, he notes.
Though, Patterson said, the Texas constitution, which was written at the same time, “was about as proslavery as you can get.”
But not all historians agree. Slavery was regularly under attack at the time and a key issue for those fighting for Texas independence, said Tomlinson, co-author of “Forget the Alamo.”
There’s still a long battle ahead to ensure slavery is incorporated into the story of the Alamo as plans for the renovation and the new museum continue, some planning committee members and local officials said.
“The genie is out of the bottle, they’re not going to be able to put this story out there without people knowing that there’s another version of what really happened,” Mario Marcel Salas, a retired political science professor and author of “The Alamo: A Cradle of Lies, Slavery, and White Supremacy,” said.
“Eventually,” said Salas, a native of San Antonio, “maybe not in my lifetime, but eventually, San Antonio will be ready to give up the myth of the Alamo.”