** Visit AAM's new website! http://www.africanassociation.org **
From: Allen Ruff <[log in to unmask]> 04/11/04 11:56AM >>>
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Alamo! The Fight for Slavery in Texas
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 23:35:44 -0500
From: portside moderator <[log in to unmask]>
Glorifying the Fight for Slavery in Texas
Forget the Alamo!
By DON SANTINA
April 8, 2004
http://counterpunch.org/santina04092004.html
Yet another film version of the story of the Alamo is
about to descend on a movie theatre near you. Due to
production delays, we have been watching trailers and
previews for over four months. According to the hoopla,
the defenders of the Alamo fought for "liberty" and
"freedom" and--as their noble commander says in a film
clip-- to "show the world what patriots are made of." A
stirring ad run during the Superbowl intoned that, at
the Alamo, "Ordinary men will become heroes."
The perpetuation of this myth of the Alamo is a
dishonest exploitation of our history. The fact is that
the defenders of the Alamo fought for white supremacy
and slavery. This latest Hollywood edition of the Alamo
story is not much different than the last half dozen or
so Alamo movies, such as the 1937 Heroes of the Alamo.
The most recent Alamo film saga was John Wayne's
lumbering effort in 1960, complete with a ponderous
musical score and a cast of thousands. All of these
films inevitably fall into a category known as White Man
Movie Fiction.
WMMF, as it is more commonly known, does not allow a
non-white actor in a movie unless the character is a
servant, a comedian, or a criminal. The result is that
the white man is always the central focus, or hero, of
whatever action or event is being portrayed, regardless
of historical fact. The first western movie, the all-
white Great Train Robbery of 1903, set the tone for this
fictional mythology of America's story of the Frontier.
We know that-in the Old West trail drives--at least one
out of every five cowboys was black. Yet hardly any
black characters have been portrayed in the thousands of
western films made during the past 100 years. Have you
seen any black guys on horses with Gene Autry, Roy
Rogers, John Wayne, Jimmie Stewart, or Gary Cooper? What
about television serials like Gunsmoke and Bonanza?
Search for black cowboys in Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp
and Kurt Russell's Tombstone.
You get the drift.
The earliest major promulgator of WMMF was the highly
esteemed director D.W. Griffith, who was a Southerner.
Griffith--like Hitler favorite Leni Rienfenstahl--is
excused for his blatant and pervading racism by film
savants because of his technical innovations and
artistic contributions to the film industry.
No one wants to be reminded that Griffith's epic 1915
film The Birth of a Nation, which was based on a
fictional and inflammatory retelling of the
Reconstruction period, contributed to the massive
rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920's. We also want
to forget that lynchings increased and pogroms were
carried out against black people throughout the South
whenever Griffith's movie was shown. The white
supremacist massacres of black people in Rosewood,
Florida and Tulsa, Oklahoma have been directly linked to
local screenings of Griffith's movie.
D.W. Griffith also made one of the first-if not the
first-fictional movies of the Alamo story, The Martyrs
of the Alamo. The through line for Griffith here is the
White Man As Hero; Non-White Man As Bad Guy. If White
Man Dies, He Dies For a Good Cause; If Non-White Man
Dies, Good Riddance. Native Americans and Mexicans
routinely fell into the Good Riddance classifications.
Another early Western film maker, William S. Hart,
continued this tradition in his movies. One of the most
notorious subtitles in Hart's silent movie Hell's Hinges
describes the villain as "mingling the oily craftiness
of a Mexican with the deadly treachery of a rattler, no
man's open enemy and no man's friend." Phew!
So what was the Alamo standoff really about?
Well, for starters, let's take a look at one of the most
legendary defenders of the Alamo, Jim Bowie.
Jim Bowie is widely celebrated in film (both Alan Ladd
and Richard Widmark portrayed him) and television (a two
year run in the '50's) as a daring and resourceful
adventurer famed for the development and usage of a
long-bladed knife which became known as the "Bowie
knife."
The facts are that Bowie was much more than a back alley
knife fighter. Shortly after the War of 1812, he and his
brother Rezin went into business as slave traders with
the pirate Jean Lafitte. In the 1820's they used their
profits from the slave trade to become land speculators
and eventually established a sugar plantation with slave
labor in Louisiana. Ten years later they sold that
business, and the 82 slaves who worked on it, for
$90,000.
Bowie took his share of the profits and went to "Texas"
to join Stephen F. Austin's group of Anglo colonists. He
then became involved in a scheme to fraudulently acquire
land grants from the Mexican government and ultimately
garnered thousands of acres of land. As the crisis
loomed between the Anglo colony and the Mexican
government, Bowie found himself on the side of William
Travis' "War Party," a group that brooked no
conciliation with the Mexican government and was
dedicated to the creation of a "Republic of Texas."
The "Republic of Texas" was a natural outgrowth of the
Austin colony which brought slavery onto Mexican soil in
1821. In 1825, twenty five per cent of the people in
Austin's colony were slaves and by 1836 there were 5,000
slaves. James S. Mayfield, a later Secretary of State
for the Republic of Texas, stated that "the true policy
and prosperity of this country (Texas) depend on the
maintenance" of slavery. Like all Southern plantation
owners, these Anglo-Texans had a plan for their own
prosperity based on the free labor of slaves.
However, the problem for the slave-owning crowd was that
the fledgling national government in Mexico City
threatened to restrict or abolish slavery on Mexican
land.
So the Texas colonists organized a convention in March,
1836 to establish the issues for which they would do
battle with the Mexican government. In a two-week period
they adopted a declaration of independence from Mexico,
declared a republic, and produced a constitution for
that republic. All of this activity occurred during the
siege of the Alamo.
The Alamo defenders fought and died for the constitution
of the Republic of Texas which declared in Sections 6, 9
and 10:
"All free white persons who emigrate to the
republic...shall be entitled to all the privileges
of citizenship.'
"All persons of color who were slaves for life
previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are
now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state
of servitude... Congress (of Texas) shall pass no
laws to prohibit emigrants from the United State of
America from bringing their slaves into the Republic
with them...nor shall Congress have the power to
emancipate slaves; nor shall any slaveholder be
allowed to emancipate his or her slave or
slaves...no free person of African descent either in
whole or in part shall be permitted to reside
permanently in the Republic without the consent of
Congress."
"All persons, (African, the descendants of Africans
and Indians excepted,) who were residing in Texas on
the day of the Declaration of Independence shall be
considered citizens of the Republic and entitled to
all the privileges of such."
Contrary to popular mythology and the spurious history
of White Man Movie Fiction, the story of the Alamo is
not a story of a fight for freedom. It is the story of a
fight for slavery. It is important for us to look
honestly at our cultural and historical mythologies so
that we can learn from them. By perpetuating the old
myths, we create a stagnant and dangerous platform which
prevents our cultural and artistic growth as a society.
Forget the Alamo as it's portrayed in this movie, but
never forget what really happened.
Don Santina is a film historian who is the author of the
Academy of Motion Picture Archive's monograph "The
History of the Cisco Kid in Film."
_______________________________________________
Post : mail to [log in to unmask]
Subscribe : mail to [log in to unmask]
Unsubscribe : mail to [log in to unmask]
Faq : http://www.portside.org
List owner : [log in to unmask]
Web address : <http://www.yahoogroups.com/group/portside>
Digest mode : visit Web site
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, visit:
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/aam.html
AAM Website: http://www.africanassociation.org
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
|