Sculptor recalls Woolworth lunch
Richard Hunt, one of America’s most prolific public art sculptors and a groundbreaking Black artist, remembers eating at the Woolworth Building in Alamo Plaza on March 16, 1960, the day seven downtown San Antonio lunch counters began serving people of color.
Hunt, now 85, was near the end of his 18-month assignment as a medic at Fort Sam Houston when a friend, noted local architect Allison Peery, offered to take him to lunch. Hunt wore his uniform when he walked up to the serpentine Woolworth counter with Peery and his wife Mimi, who both were white. He ordered a ham sandwich and a Coke.
They had lunch without an eyebrow raised, in stark contrast to sit-ins, arrests and violence occurring in other cities in Texas and across the South, Hunt
said.
“Like I say and have said before, compare that to all the other lunch counter sit-ins around the country. We were able to do it without obviously being spat on or having policemen take us out. I mean, there were all these things that happened in lunch counters around the country that didn’t happen in San Antonio because of the San Antonians, because of the Army and the Air Force,” Hunt said.
Hunt had been served at lunch counters in his hometown of Chicago, and he remembers being the only Black person at the Woolworth counter that afternoon.
San Antonio’s connection to Hunt has surfaced as a new plan for Alamo Plaza seeks to keep the Woolworth Building standing as a civil rights icon. The 1921 structure is one of three state-owned buildings on the west side of the plaza, where an Alamo museum is planned. An architect’s report for the Alamo Trust favors incorporating the structures into a museum design.
The City Council is set to vote Thursday on an amended lease agreement with the Texas General Land Office that supports an updated plan for a $450 million project to interpret the mission and battle site. Mayor Ron Nirenberg, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and the broad-based Coalition for the Woolworth Building advocate saving the structure, which was shown as having been moved or demolished in 2018 renderings of the Alamo project.
Hunt, then 24, and his wife were among some 1,500 people at an NAACP rally on March 13, 1960, at the Second Baptist Church in San Antonio, calling for an end to segregation at lunch counters. Less than a week earlier, a Black man in Houston, Felton Turner, 27, was kidnapped and tortured by white supremacists in response to sit-ins that had begun there, according to newspaper reports.
Carey Latimore, a history professor at Trinity University, said in a report compiled for the Alamo Trust on the civil rights movement in San Antonio that tensions here were high after demonstrations in Austin and Galveston “had become testy and teetered on the edge of breaking into violence.”
The local Council of Churches negotiated an agreement with business owners to desegregate the lunch counters the day before Hunt’s historic lunch. Local leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had threatened to begin staging protests as early as March 17 if the businesses continued to discriminate.
In agreeing to integrate, San Antonio business owners “demanded that black leaders inform African Americans to not rush to the stores too quickly.”
Jon Ott, chairman of the International Sculpture Center and publisher of Sculpture magazine, has spent more than 100 hours interviewing Hunt. . Ott said Hunt’s visit to the Woolworth that day was a remarkable event in the civil rights movement and the life of a sculptor who has made “the largest contribution to public art” in the nation.
“The combination of the military, the combination of the people of San Antonio, led to a unique set of circumstances that allowed Richard to go there that day — peacefully,” Ott said.
A descendant of slaves brought to America through the port of Savannah, Ga., Hunt was the first African American visual artist to serve on the National Council on the Arts, Ott said. Hunt was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. His works include a monument to Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have Been to the Mountaintop,” on public display in Memphis, and “Swing Low,” a massive welded bronze homage to the African American spiritual song, on exhibit at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
Hunt went on to secure 160 public sculpture commissions in 22 states and hold over 100 solo exhibitions. His work is exhibited in more than 100 public museums.
The sculptor recalled being welcomed into San Antonio’s art scene. With income from the sale of art that supplemented his military pay, he and his wife rented housing in a newer neighborhood for noncommissioned officers, even though he was only a private. He also taught art to soldiers at one of the clubs at Fort Sam Houston.
Hunt befriended famed midcentury architect O’neil Ford and members of the San Antonio Men of Art Guild. One of its members invited him to work in the Mill Race Studio, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum, creator of Mount Rushmore, had developed prototypes in the 1920s and ’30s for the famed monument in South Dakota.
That studio, originally built in the 1880s as Pump House No. 2 in the local water distribution system, is now known as Borglum Studio and is city-owned, near the Brackenridge Golf Course.
Hunt fondly remembers “the alley behind the Alamo” — a “nice little corridor” by the Crockett Hotel, with a bookstore and Stewart Rickard Gallery, where he had a solo exhibition while it was open from 1958-1963.
He now lives in Chicago and still produces his abstract sculptures. He said San Antonio’s diversity, military ties and welcoming spirit contributed to an acceptance of change at a time when lunch counter desegregation was at the forefront of the civil rights movement.
Given the tension at the time, and the reality that it quickly passed, Hunt agreed with a remark by baseball great Jackie Robinson that San Antonio’s coordinated lunch counter integrated was “a story that should be told around the world.”
“What he said carries a lot of weight and import,” said Hunt, who was pleased with local efforts to save the Woolworth Building as part of a plaza makeover.
“I would like to see it standing as a symbol,” he said. “It’s good to think about San Antonio and reminisce — think about the way forward.”