Prof hopes for new way of discussing Alamo, slavery.
Trinity University history professor Carey Latimore hopes to begin a new, “third way” of talking about the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, acknowledging slavery as “part of a larger number of issues” but not the main reason for the war of independence from Mexico.
“In having this conversation, it doesn’t mean that we’re dismissing some things. It means that we’re adding so much more,” Latimore said.
Latimore was speaking at a recent virtual lecture hosted by the Alamo Trust and Texas General Land Office on a topic that is perhaps the most sensitive in the historic icon’s legacy.
The professor, whose ancestry includes slave owners as well as people who were themselves enslaved, provided an in-depth overview of the evolution of slavery in the United States — an institution that wrought immeasurable human suffering, yet propped up a New World economy.
“It’s two sides of one coin,” said Latimore, 45. “I recognize all of my ancestry as a struggle within me but also a struggle within Americans to come to some type of reconciliation of who and what we are.”
For years, talk of slavery has ranged from scholarly debates to tense exchanges on social media. Latimore noted that some historians, true to the traditional Alamo narrative of a siege and battle for freedom, have said slavery wasn’t an issue in the revolution. Others, he said, have pointed to it as “the” issue.
The “third way” to think of the Alamo, and the later establishment of slavery by the Republic of Texas, is as part of a range of issues, from religious freedom and the right to bear arms to disagreement over governance. Many who wanted local and regional representation opposed centralist control and the regime of Mexico’s president, Gen. Antonio López de Santa Anna.
But slavery cannot be dismissed as a factor in the birth of an independent Texas, followed by U.S. statehood a decade later, Latimore said.
“We often find that people don’t enter revolutions for one reason. It’s a lot of things that lead people to revolution,” he said.
An honest portrayal of slavery as a factor in the Texas Revolu
tion is included in the vision and guiding principles of a planned project to expand and improve the Alamo. Latimore, recently hired by the nonprofit Alamo Trust to write a report examining the role of lunch counter desegregation as a part of the civil rights movement in San Antonio from World War II to the 1960s, has said he’d like to be part of that discussion. Two of seven downtown lunch counters that peacefully desegregated in 1960, including one that was in the 1921 Woolworth Building, are in Alamo Plaza, within the footprint of the 1836 Alamo.
Latimore, an associate professor at Trinity, has said he hopes to at least untangle some of the complexities of the Alamo, including the role of Texas forming an independent republic, while not necessarily taking a hard-line stand. Although many of his published works have focused on slavery and the lives of African Americans after the Civil War in Virginia, where he was born and reared, the subjects he teaches have a broader scope to include the Old South and free Blacks in America, according to his page on the Trinity University website.
Robyn Oguinye, a 28-year-old reporter with News 4 San Antonio who moderated the virtual forum, touched on stories of segregation and racism passed down through her family, and encouraged viewers to “think about how these events that happened not so long ago affect how we interact with each other today.”
“Your neighbor who looks different than you, talk to them. A classmate. Whoever. Gain knowledge and information in whatever way you can,” Oguinye said. “That’s going to shape and contextualize how we look at things in the future.”
Latimore’s Feb. 9 forum, posted on the Alamo’s Youtube page, reflected the virtual approach the Alamo is taking for this year’s commemoration events of the siege and 13-day battle starting Tuesday.
Last year, the state-owned mission and battle site staged a lineup of daily in-person events just days before the pandemic forced the Alamo to close to the public on March 16. This year, many will be presented in-person, with modifications to adhere with public health guidance, and digital content available online. Most events are free.
The popular early morning “Dawn at the Alamo” ceremony on March 6 is planned as an inperson event on the battle anniversary, with coronavirus restrictions in place. Masks are required, and social distancing will be observed.
During the forum, Latimore said the American Revolution ended slavery in the North.
“The initial revolutionaries detested the idea of slavery, even if they owned slaves themselves,” Latimore said.
But a ban on the international slave trade by Congress in 1808 and a “cotton revolution” in the deep South fueled a three-fold increase in the value of slaves, and more than 1 million enslaved people were moved from one region of the South to another by 1860, he said. Black families were torn apart.
Sarah Graves was 6 months old when she and her mother were sold to a man from Missouri and separated from her father in Kentucky. Her mother never was told where her father was located.
“Our master wanted her to marry again and raise more children to be slaves. They never wanted Mama to know where Papa was. And she never did,” Graves recalled in a 1930s interview for a Works Progress Administration project.
“Family units are being broken up. And so we can look at it as an economic move. But it’s also a personal move of people south and southwest,” Latimore said.
The war with Mexico led to antagonism toward slavery, but preserved debt servitude and other forms of forced labor, he said. American slave owners in Texas widely disregarded laws enacted against slavery in the 1820s, and sometimes circumvented them by fabricating “worker contracts.”
After Texas won its independence, the number of slaves in the state shot up from 5,000 in 1835 to about 30,000 in 1845; 60,000 in 1850; and well over 100,000 in 1860. Many lived in East Texas, although some worked in southern Bexar County and neighboring Wilson County.
“Texas will emerge really as a slave place, a place that slavery is firmly established and protections will always reside with a slave nation,” Latimore said.
Sarah Ashley, a former slave who lived in East Texas, was interviewed in 1936 for the WPA oral history project. She recalled having to walk a mile every day to fields where she picked cotton. Although she always produced her allotted yield — failure would result in a whipping — she and the others would often have bloody, calloused hands at the end of the day and never had enough to eat.
“I’m not saying that we dismiss those heroes of the Texas Revolution. But I think that we can also add people like Sarah Ashley to that conversation,” Latimore said. “Part of the reason that we are divided is that we don’t share the full story. We only share pieces of it and then expect us to be a whole by sharing a piece.”