Civil Rights Tourism

April 16, 2019 Blog, Diversity, Inclusion and Racial Justice, Interpretation, Texas Comments (0) 1399

“The U.S. Civil Rights Trail was designed to motivate people to learn more, see more and feel more. The website can tell the stories, but the emotional weight of those stories cannot be fully absorbed without standing in the exact spots where sacrifices were made and the direction of history was changed.”

Howard University, Washington, D.C.

The Civil Rights Trail combines sites that have been significant in the battle for Civil Rights, especially the 1950s and 1960s. Launched in January, 2018, the Trail includes over 100 sites in 14 states. Given the incredible popular success of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture and the fact that Civil Rights tourism is a growth sector demanding honest history, the identification and interpretation of such sites promises to be an economic boon to communities where these resources are located.

Display in National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D C

The National Civil Rights Trail includes over 100 sites in 14 states, but none in Texas, although Dallas has developed its own Civil Rights Trail. The opportunity is great: a $63bn industry.

In San Antonio, we have the story of the first voluntary and peaceful integration of a Woolworth’s lunch counter on March 16, 1960, a story that Jackie Robinson said “should be told around the world.” He was quoted in the New York Times on March 20, 1960, but the story did not have the “legs” of the more confrontational protests in other cities.

2018 San Antonio Tricentennial mural at Hemisfair. From a March 16, 1960 photograph of a young man looking into Woolworth’s

In addition to Woolworth’s the sites of the Kress, H.L. Green, Grant’s, Sommers and Neisner’s stores survive, sans lunch counters. The beginnings of a Civil Rights trail are right in front of us, although the concern is that at least two of these could disappear soon.

Kress Building, Houston Street, San Antonio

Thanks to local landscape architect and historian Everett Fly, more overlooked sites in San Antonio are now being uncovered. You could see markers for the Rincon School near the River Walk, but Fly’s work has really illuminated the importance of downtown – notably Alamo Plaza, in a struggle for equal rights that goes back to the early 1880s.

African American barbers plied their trade at the Menger Hotel, and an African American owned a cleaning shop at the rear. Across the street, Joske’s Store was built on the site of an 1860s slave market. In 1960, Joske’s resisted integration as seven other downtown stores adopted equal serving policies.
This was H.L. Green’s, another lunch counter that integrated that day. It is a block south of Woolworth’s and across from the Menger.

The challenge now is to bundle these sites – and many more, into a package that can attract tourist investment. In San Antonio we already have the largest Martin Luther King Day march, active contingents of Buffalo Soldier interpreters, and Everett Fly’s impressive research into African American cemeteries.

Buffalo soldiers at Rodeo Parade

The opportunity is there. The question is: Do we embrace it?

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