By Scott Huddleston STAFF WRITER
A leader in San Antonio’s African American community has declared herself to be “serving under protest” on an Alamo advisory committee that fractured over how to depict an enslaved Black man named Joe.
Specifically, over the panel’s narrow vote, in one of its meetings out of the public eye, to approve plans for a statue of Joe armed with a musket during the 1836 siege of the mission-fort.
“As the people that came before me, including Joe, you can bend me, but I WILL not break,” Deborah Omowale Jarmon wrote in a letter to the Express-News, with copies sent to the nonprofit Alamo Trust and some of her colleagues on the Alamo Museum Planning Committee.
Jarmon, the CEO/director of the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, was among the dissenters in the decision to OK a bronze figure of Joe, the personal servant of Alamo commander William Barret Travis, standing guard as Travis writes the “victory or death” letter that will propel him into history when he is killed a few days later.
Joe’s own contribution to history was that he survived and provided an early, detailed account of the battle.
But the problem with his depiction, Jarmon said, is that people walking into the Alamo’s new visitor center will see his statue and assume he was “happily enslaved” and supported the Texas Revolution as an armed combatant.
Accurately portraying slavery in early Texas has long been acknowledged as one of the bigger challenges of the $550 million Alamo makeover overseen by the Alamo Trust with state, local and private funding.
The planning committee’s roughly 25 members were assembled in 2021 to provide multiple perspectives, but the question of whether Joe’s duties would require or even allow him to carry a gun turned the larger subject into a contentious argument early in March, participants said.
“Multiple sources say Joe did carry a firearm,” said one member who didn’t agree with Jarmon’s position. “People have different opinions, and Joe was where it all came to a head.”
Committee members are under a strict pledge not to talk about its actions or “confidential information or opinions expressed in meetings” without approval of the Alamo Trust or committee leaders, but several confirmed Jarmon’s account, speaking on condition of anonymity.
She is one of three Black members on the panel. Up until the recent debate, the committee had been operating through consensus, and putting any decision to a vote means her viewpoint won’t prevail, Jarmon predicted in an interview.
Photos for the nine vignettes planned for the visitor center, depicting various periods from the Alamo’s 300-year history, were shot in January to guide the bronze castings.
They included images of Joshua Obadiah, a Nigerian-born local university senior, in various poses in the role of Joe with another actor portraying Travis at his desk on Feb. 24, 1836. Alamo staff members said it’s conjecture, but Joe might have guarded the commander’s quarters while the Alamo was under bombardment by Mexican cannon.
Jarmon questions the authenticity of the clothes and the relevance of showing Joe armed. Though one of several enslaved African Americans who survived the battle — one woman reportedly died, fatally wounded by crossfire — he was the most prominent in the Alamo story.
The Alamo’s website, quoting a diary entry by soldier-lawyer William Fairfax Gray two weeks after the battle, said Joe described Travis running from his quarters with a rifle and sword as Mexican troops began their assault on March 6. “Joe took his gun and followed,” Gray wrote, and after Travis was killed, “ensconced himself in a house, from which he says he fired on them several times.”
After the battle, when Mexican officers called for “any negroes” to come out, Joe emerged and two soldiers assaulted him, Gray wrote. He had two minor wounds: “one buckshot” on one side and a scratch from a bayonet on the other.
The victors summarily executed a handful of Anglo prisoners. They spared Joe. According to historian Bruce Winders, he was sent to Gonzales “to spread the word” of the death of nearly 200 Anglo and Tejano rebels.
“Joe’s account of the Alamo became the basis of the traditional tale of the battle,” Winders wrote.
Jarmon said there’s “mixed scholarship” on whether Joe was armed, since some accounts didn’t mention a gun. If he did fire one, she questions whether he “defended the Alamo” or just tried to protect himself. Her greatest concern is that one of the first things people will see in the lobby when the visitor center opens in 2027 is a statue suggesting Joe was there to support the cause of Texas independence.
He had no choice but to be wherever Travis wanted him and remained enslaved after the battle until he escaped a year later.
“There are people who have a hard time believing that Texas had anything to do with chattel slavery,” Jarmon said. “And now you see this person of color holding a gun. That perpetuates the myth.”
The Alamo’s status as the Cradle of Texas Liberty developed with an Anglo-centric heroic narrative co-opted by Walt Disney and John Wayne. One goal of the Alamo project is to highlight the difficult reality that freedom took well over a century for people of color to achieve.
Under its guiding principles, the Alamo will include Black, Mexican, Tejano and Native American perspectives in telling its story. The visitor center will provide free access to a first-floor civil rights exhibit. Part of a lunch counter that helped San Antonio peacefully desegregate in 1960 will be reconstructed in its original place in the 1921 Woolworth Building.
Jarmon said she wrote the letter because she didn’t want her presence on the committee “taken as an approval” for a decision she opposed. She’s asking that the group meet more than three or four times a year, be more diverse, particularly its male-dominated interpretive scholars panel, hold to a consensus model for decision-making and give weighted consideration in matters affecting specific groups, including Tejanos and Native Americans.
“It’s not the Cradle of Liberty for everyone,” Jarmon said.
She’s received backing from Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert, who has supported the Alamo project as a means for creating an “epicenter for healing,” and she plans to meet in mid-April with Alamo Trust Executive Director Kate Rogers and Hope Andrade, chair of the Alamo project’s Management Committee.
In a statement, Rogers said the trust is “extremely grateful” to community stakeholders, museum professionals and historians who volunteer their time on the committee.
“We are committed to telling the full 300-year history of the site in an honest and authentic way while relying on primary source evidence to drive the content creation process,” Rogers said.
“While the members of the committee may not always agree with each other, our goal is to foster an environment of collaboration and candor so that, in the end, we can deliver a world-class experience to our visitors,” and the current debate reflects that give and take over historical nuance, she said.
“We will continue to listen and work collaboratively in hopes that we can work together on a productive path forward,” she said.
Another committee member said the overall experience on the panel has been positive and credited Mimi Quintanilla with facilitating meetings and James Lide, senior director of interpretation with Gallagher & Associates, the project’s program manager, for providing updates and gathering feedback.
There has been some unrest, the member said.
“I would hate for it to derail things, because I think it’s going to be really incredible,” the committee member said. “James and his group have really listened and bent over backwards to get this right. To her credit, I think Kate has worked hard to hear all sides and to be responsive to concerns.”
The member was worried that deciding things by voting rather than consensus could lead to Indigenous and African American voices being disregarded.
“I think it behooves us to listen to those groups who are being represented,” the member said.
Jerry Patterson, who was the Texas land commissioner when the General Land Office assumed control of the Alamo from the Daughters of the Republic of Texas in 2011, has served on the committee for about a year. He declined to discuss the debate over the portrayal of Joe.
But he repeated talking points from his website, 1836truth.com, where he argues slavery was only one of numerous factors that drove the 1836 war for independence from Mexico.
During the Alamo siege, delegates hundreds of miles to the east were listing 20 grievances in the Texas Declaration of Independence, including lack of representation, religious freedom and the right to bear arms, without mentioning slavery.
Then they started working on a constitution that was “about as pro-slavery as a document can be,” Patterson added.
Honesty requires uncomfortable discussions, but the Alamo should be honest, particularly with visitors among the nearly 4 million African American Texans and other people of color worldwide, about the fact that the economy of early Texas was based on cotton and slave labor, Patterson said.
“Everybody comes in with a bias, myself included,” he said. “We’ve avoided difficult conversations. Until this came up.”