Virus fear won’t stop S.A. historic activist
SAN ANTONIO — The city put the brakes on a gathering Monday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the desegregation of local lunch counters Monday, but it couldn’t stop Nettie Hinton from talking to tourists about African American and civil rights history in Alamo Plaza.
“You can’t tell me no,” Hinton said, sitting on her stroller chair. “I’m 81 years old and a child of the civil rights movement — was a part of a group that integrated the University of Texas at Austin. And so I have learned through experience that you do what you’re supposed to do.”
Hinton, a member of the Coalition for the Woolworth Building, had planned to gather with other community activists and preservationists for the anniversary of an event that briefly put San Antonio in the national news in 1960. Seven lunch counters, including one at the Woolworth store, voluntarily desegregated through an agreement brokered between local religious leaders and business owners, amid a threat of planned demonstrations by the NAACP.
The Conservation Society of San Antonio, leading the coalition and a campaign to protect the 1921 Woolworth Building from demolition, canceled the commemoration at the request of city leaders, who are discouraging gatherings of 50 or more people amid concerns over the coronavirus pandemic.
On a related note, the stateowned Alamo announced Monday afternoon that it was “closed until further notice,” following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control. It had previously stayed open, limiting the number of guests allowed at one time into the Alamo church, exhibit hall and gift shop, in accordance with city directives. The Alamo also had placed hand-sanitizing stations and signage about the virus throughout the grounds.
Hinton, who doesn’t have any immunodeficiencies but is at higher risk by virtue of her age, said she wasn’t going to let the “beer virus” stop her from sitting by the Woolworth Building across from the iconic church, talking about the plaza’s ties to black history. She held a sign with a photo of Mary Lillian Andrews, an early youth leader of the NAACP who initiated the San Antonio
desegregation movement.
“If you have spent your life as a black person, being ghettoized, desegregated, denied all kinds of things, I think the Lord’s going to deny me the (coronavirus), as long as I’m doing the right thing for the right reason,” she said.
The Alamo, seen by many as a symbol of freedom, has a connection to slavery. Almost 200 men were killed in the early morning Battle of the Alamo on March 6, 1836. When Texas became a republic, independent from Mexico, after the Battle of San Jacinto six weeks later, slavery was legalized in its constitution.
“And it was not that long afterwards that this became part of the Confederacy. That’s the history of the city that has not been told,” Hinton said.
By 1960, segregation of people of color at lunch counters had become a national issue. Many cities experienced protests, riots and violence over it.
On March 16, 1960, the San Antonio Express published a banner headline, “Lunch Counter Integration to Begin Today in S.A.” The “surprise move” was announced the night before by local religious and business leaders after a closed, daylong meeting ended in an agreement for “a quiet and orderly policy of no discrimination.”
Earlier that week, about 1,500 people at a rally led by the NAACP had pledged to begin lunch counter demonstrations in San Antonio by March 17.
The same peaceful integration happened at six other stores, some in buildings that remain standing: Kress; the former Neisner and the former Sommers buildings, all on Houston Street; and the former H.L. Green building on Alamo Plaza.
Now, a $450 million, publicprivate overhaul of the mission and battle site could result in demolition of the Woolworth Building, to allow for construction of a new 130,000-square-foot Alamo museum. Designs for the planned museum and visitors center have not been completed. Two reports on the building’s history and architecture that might guide the design have not been released.
Hinton, the conservation society, Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and others say the north and east facades of the Woolworth Building should be incorporated into the museum’s design, as a symbol of the civil rights history that occurred at the same place where the mission had long stood and the battle was fought. There’s history there that covers three centuries.
But some Texans who want the site to focus on the Battle of 1836 support razing those facades for construction of a modern museum and interpretation of the Alamo’s west wall.
Patti Zaiontz, conservation society president, said the current health crisis, with its effect on restaurants and dining habits, offers a chance for Texans to pause and “consider the depth of what happened 60 years ago today.”
The group had planned to carry signs Monday with photos of Andrews and about 10 other civil rights and religious leaders instrumental in the voluntary reform. But coronavirus concerns negated the group’s effort to honor an event that Zaiontz said complements the 1836 battle.
“The proximity of the Woolworth Building to the Alamo provides an ideal setting to explore the many struggles that occurred on the difficult journey towards freedom for all Texans,” Zaiontz said in a statement.
Hinton, who remembers eating sugar doughnuts at the Woolworth while waiting as a child at Houston and Alamo streets to ride a bus home to the East Side, said she wants to see the building’s lunch counter reconstructed as a tribute to the peaceful integration.
Baseball legend Jackie Robinson, who visited the city a few days after the integration and spoke at the invitation of two local churches, was quoted in newspapers nationwide as saying that “San Antonians are setting examples for the whole nation.”
With many people self-isolated because of the virus, now is a good time to reflect on freedom and the pursuit of happiness, Hinton said.
“You probably could take this as an opportunity to understand that sort of a thing,” she said.