Black history museum at home in La Villita
Exhibit space in historic arts village is run by San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum
With free admission and a covered front porch furnished with rocking chairs, the new Black history museum in La Villita is inviting.
The 700-square-foot exhibit space run by the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, 218 S. Presa St., is in the southwest corner of the historic arts village. One of the first things visitors notice at the entrance is a photo of the front page of the San Antonio Express from April 5, 1968 — one day before the opening of HemisFair ’68 and a day after the assassination in Memphis of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Walls of the front foyer of the SAAACAM (pronounced “sayCAM”) facility are filled with a timeline that traces the African American journey in San Antonio and Texas, from the first Spanish expeditions of the 1500s through the Jim Crow era and civil rights struggles to end segregation.
The first African to step on Texas soil was Estevanico, an enslaved explorer-interpreter who arrived on the coast in about 1529. He was killed by members of an indigenous tribe a decade later.
The timeline also commemorates Hendrick Arnold and Sam McCullough, who fought in the Texas Revolution, and other Black pioneering figures of their time: Dr. Greene J. Starnes, the first local African American surgeon in 1884; entrepreneurs Samuel J. Sutton Jr. and Charles Bellinger; and St. Philip’s College founder Artemisia Bowden, who was named a saint by the Episcopal Church in 2015.
SAAACAM, which has quickly become a force on matters involving local Black history, had previously kept exhibit space at a historic homestead on the near East Side before its lease expired a year ago. It emerged among five bidders who submitted proposals with the city to secure the space in La Villita.
Heather Williams, program director with the 4-year-old archive and museum, said the group has broader reach since opening in La Villita in March and is connecting with downtown visitors.
“They love it. And because of the fact the majority of our visitors are from out of town, they leave saying they are going to tell people in their community about this space,” Williams said.
A separate room for rotating exhibits pays tribute to Eugene Coleman, a photojournalist and co-founder of SNAP, a local Black magazine and one of San Antonio’s longest-running weeklies. Coleman died in 2019 at age 97.
SNAP, short for snapshot, provided updates on the local civil rights movement, politics, police brutality and other issues of importance to African Americans.
“He was a very well-known, respected gentleman in the community. But during his era — and because of the controversial topics that he covered in his publication, which were informative and true — he was not very well liked by politicians and law enforcement officials here in San Antonio,” Williams said.
The exhibit space, housed in the early 1880s Dosch-Rische House, also includes a two-panel timeline showing local and national civil rights highlights of the 20th century. Visitors can wrap up their tour, if they wish, by leaving behind a self-recorded interview at a digital kiosk, which poses such questions as, “What is your story?” and “Who are your heroes?”
“Every single person who comes and visits, they learn something new and interesting that they never knew about San Antonio,” Williams said.
To keep admission free, SAAACAM relies on donations, grants and memberships starting at $15 annually, as well as sales from its small gift shop. To learn how to get involved, visit the group’s website at saaacam.org.
The group’s mission is to “collect, preserve and share the cultural heritage of African Americans in the San Antonio region.” Although it’s looking for a larger exhibit space, Williams said it wants to keep its presence in La Villita.
“We encourage people who are either from here or have family members from here to look in the old attics,” she said. “Ask Grandma about things that she’s done in the past. She may have documents that she’d like to have saved. And that’s what we do. We collect, we preserve and we share.”