WOAI (a San Antonio based news radio station) provided news story:
The next post has the rest of the story, whch includes a transcript of the Nick News sound bite.
The Alamo a Symbol of Slavery?
(SAN ANTONIO) -- A claim on the children's cable TV outlet Nickelodeon that the 1836 Battle of the Alamo was fought so 'white farmers could keep their slaves' has sparked controversy and outrage in this city, where the Texans who died in the historic battle are held up as examples for people to emulate, 1200 WOAI news reported Tuesday.
The fifty second long piece on Nickelodeon, which is part of an ongoing series of features about the U.S. called 'My Back Yard," shows a San Antonio teenager telling the largely pre-teen audience that 'in the early 1800's, most of the people living in San Antonio were white farmers who brought their slaves with them.' It goes on to claim that conflict over slavery between slaveholding settlers and a Mexican government which had abolished slavery 'led up' to the Battle of the Alamo.
"I think its a shame that anybody would take that approach," Alamo Director David Stewart says. "I think its an insult to the Mexicans, the Tejanos, who fought for freedom and liberty in the Alamo as part of the defenders. It kind of slaps them in the face to claim that was the reason the battle took place."
E-mails obtained by WOAI radio show Alamo historian Dr. R. Bruce Winders, one of the country's leading experts on pre Civil War southwestern history, told Nickelodeon producers that the slavery claim was 'simplistic and inaccurate,' but the piece was aired anyway.
Mark Lyons, a senior producer for Nick News at Lucky Duck Productions in New York City, a contractor to Nickelodeon, which is a unit of Viacom, Inc. says the piece, called an 'interstitial,' was not meant to convey the full story of the Alamo.
"We recognize that there were several key issues in the Battle of the Alamo and one of them was slavery," Lyons said. "We want to tell our viewers something they may not have known, like the fact that at the time Texas was a part of Mexico."
Winders remains critical of the way the piece was presented.
"I think this is an extreme interpretation that was very one-sided as well as inaccurate," he said Monday. They replied that they wanted to get a Hispanic opinion of the battle. I pointed out that many people would not be able to tell that the piece was opinion and not fact, but they ran the story as it was."
Stewart says he hopes young people will not see the Alamo as a 'monument to slavery.'
"People decide to take their own slant on something and put it out there as fact when it's not necessarily fact," he said.
He also pointed out that the claim that 'most of the people' living in San Antonio in the 'early 1800s' were white farmers who brought their slaves with them' is also blatantly incorrect. San Antonio, which had been the key urban center of the Spanish province and later the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas, was almost entirely made up of Spanish-speaking people of Mexican and Spanish descent in the years before 1836. In fact, with the exception of Jim Bowie, who had married into the most prominent Tejano family in San Antonio, almost none of the Anglos who died in the Battle of the Alamo had any connection to San Antonio whatsoever, and many, including Davy Crockett, had arrived in Texas less than a year before the battle. William Barret Travis, the commander of the Texian forces at the Alamo, for example, was born in South Carolina, grew up in Alabama, and lived in Anahuac and San Felipe Texas. He arrived in San Antonio for the first time in his life as part of the Texian militia sent to relieve Mexican General Martin Perfecto de Cos' siege of Bexar in October of 1835, just three months before the start of the Alamo siege. And while there was a scattering of slaves in the cotton growing regions of extreme southeast Texas, there were almost no slaves in the San Antonio area. "The battle was fought here because Santa Anna had revoked the Constitution of 1824, and taken away the freedoms that the people came here to enjoy," Stewart said.
Winders says the slavery connection is a stretch at best, and mischaracterization as worst. "The slavery issue was a factor but not the main one. The revolt in Texas started as an effort to restore the Federal Republic under the (Mexican) constitution of 1824, but quickly evolved into a separatist movement. Moreover, Texas had actually been granted an exemption to the slavery ban by the Mexican government, as long as they didn't call them slaves," he wrote to the Nickelodeon producers.
Stewart pointed out that the 'patron' system which existed in Mexico throughout the 19th century was in fact, slavery by a different name.
The Alamo is by far the number one tourist attraction in Texas and one of the most visited spots in the United States. The Alamo church, with its characteristic curved roofline, regularly appears along with the State of Liberty, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and the golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco as one of the most recognized American landmarks worldwide.
The perception of the Battle of the Alamo, which began with a siege by 5,000 Mexican regular army troops under General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna on February 23, 1836 and ended 13 days later when Santa Anna stormed the church, has evolved over time. In the 1960 movie starring John Wayne as Davy Crockett, the Alamo defenders are depicted as white heroes holding off a rabble of dark skinned marauders. Later depictions, leading up to the 2004 Disney movie starring Billy Bob Thornton in the Crockett role, have taken pains to explain the prominent role that Tejanos, Texans of Mexican descent, played in the battle, and explored the reasons Santa Anna, who is still universally despised in Mexico, played in the development of the American southwest.
Lyons says the Nickelodeon piece has run for about two weeks and has rotated out of the "My Back Yard" series. it is not expected to be aired again.
The next post has the rest of the story, whch includes a transcript of the Nick News sound bite.
