--- title: It's Time to Correct the Myths About the Battle of Alamo description: So much of what we “know” about the battle at the Alamo is provably wrong canonical: https://time.com/6072141/alamo-history-myths/ author: Bryan Burrough article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2021-06-09T21:43:54.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T01:12:50.000Z article:section: History og:title: It's Time to Correct the Alamo Story og:description: So much of what we “know” about the battle at the Alamo is provably wrong og:url: https://time.com/6072141/alamo-history-myths/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt37b426d4d9bf7037/698a1a414ee262237a3190b4/alamo.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: Battle Of The Alamo og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: It's Time to Correct the Alamo Story twitter:description: So much of what we “know” about the battle at the Alamo is provably wrong twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt37b426d4d9bf7037/698a1a414ee262237a3190b4/alamo.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # We've Been Telling the Alamo Story Wrong for Nearly 200 Years. Now It's Time to Correct the Record > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets [Watch (HLS stream): The History You Didn't Learn: Black Wall Streets](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/W3Zny2Gh.m3u8) (10:26)  _Published 2021-05-28. It's been 100 years since the Tulsa race massacre, when an angry white mob destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa Oklahoma. But Tulsa's story is part of a larger history of Black Wall Streets that existed in many American cities._ by [Bryan Burrough](https://time.com/author/bryan-burrough/) and [Jason Stanford](https://time.com/author/jason-stanford/) Updated: Dec 12, 2023 1:12 AM UTCPublished: Jun 9, 2021 9:43 PM UTC  Illustration of the Battle of the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas, March 6, 1836. Illustration of the Battle of the Alamo, San Antonio, Texas, March 6, 1836. Getty Images by [Bryan Burrough](https://time.com/author/bryan-burrough/) and [Jason Stanford](https://time.com/author/jason-stanford/) Updated: Dec 12, 2023 1:12 AM UTCPublished: Jun 9, 2021 9:43 PM UTC Imagine if the U.S. were to open interior Alaska for colonization and, for whatever reason, thousands of Canadian settlers poured in, establishing their own towns, hockey rinks and Tim Hortons stores. When the U.S. insists they follow American laws and pay American taxes, they refuse. When the government tries to collect taxes, they shoot and kill American soldiers. When law enforcement goes after the killers, the colonists, backed by Canadian financing and mercenaries, take up arms in open revolt. As an American, how would you feel? Now you can imagine how Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna would have felt in 1835, because that’s pretty much the story of the revolution that paved the way for [Texas to become its own nation](https://time.com/4329364/texas-secede-history/) and then an American state. If that’s not the version of history you’re familiar with, you’re not alone. The version most Americans know, the “Heroic Anglo Narrative” that has held sway for nearly 200 years, holds that American colonists revolted against Mexico because they were “oppressed” and fought for their “freedom,” a narrative that has been soundly rebutted by 30-plus years of academic scholarship. But the many myths surrounding Texas’ birth, especially those cloaking the fabled 1836 siege at the [Alamo mission in San Antonio](https://time.com/3544883/phil-collins-alamo-artifact-texas/), remain cherished in the state. Even as the nation is undergoing a sweeping [reassessment of its racial history,](https://time.com/5682139/porvenir-massacre-descendants/) and despite decades of academic research that casts the Texas Revolt and the Alamo’s siege in a new light, little of this has permeated the conversation in Texas. Start with the Alamo. So much of what we “know” about the battle is provably wrong. William Travis never drew any [line in the sand](https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/alamo-line-in-the-sand); this was a tale concocted by an amateur historian in the late 1800s. There is no evidence Davy Crockett went down fighting, as John Wayne famously did in his 1960 movie _The Alamo_, a font of misinformation; there is ample testimony from Mexican soldiers that Crockett surrendered and was executed. The battle, in fact, should never have been fought. Travis ignored multiple warnings of Santa Anna’s approach and was simply trapped in the Alamo when the Mexican army arrived. He wrote some dramatic letters during the ensuing siege, it’s true, but how anyone could attest to the defenders’ “bravery” is beyond us. The men at the Alamo fought and died because they had no choice. Even the notion they “fought to the last man” turns out to be untrue. Mexican accounts make clear that, as the battle was being lost, as many as half the “Texian” defenders fled the mission and were run down and killed by Mexican lancers. Nor is it at all clear that the Alamo’s defenders “bought time” for Sam Houston to raise the army that eventually defeated Santa Anna at the [Battle of San Jacinto](https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/san-jacinto-battle-of) the following month. Santa Anna had told Mexico City he expected to take San Antonio by March 2; he ended up doing so on March 6\. In the end, the siege at the Alamo ended up costing him all of four days. Meaning the Alamo’s defenders, far from being the valiant defenders who delayed Santa Anna, pretty much died for nothing. So why does any of this matter? What’s the harm in Texans simply embracing a myth? [_Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter_](http://time.com/newsletter-history) [Census data indicates](https://www.texastribune.org/2019/06/20/texas-hispanic-population-pace-surpass-white-residents/) that Latinos are poised to become a majority of the Texas population any year now, and for them, the Alamo has long been viewed as a symbol of Anglo oppression. The fact that many Tejanos — Texas Latinos— allied with the Americans, and fought and died alongside them at the Alamo, has generally been lost to popular history. The Tejanos’ key contributions to early Texas were written out of almost all early Anglo-authored histories, much as Anglo Texans ran Tejanos out of San Antonio and much of South Texas after the revolt. For too long, the revolt has been viewed by many as a war fought by all Anglos against all of Mexican descent. “If you’re looking at the Alamo as a kind of state religion, this is the original sin,” says San Antonio art historian Ruben Cordova. “We killed [Davy Crockett.](https://time.com/4450210/davy-crockett-ballad-factchecking/)” It’s a lesson many Latinos in the state don’t learn until mandatory Texas history classes taught in seventh grade. “The way I explain it,” says Andres Tijerina, a retired history professor in Austin, “is Mexican-Americans \[in Texas\] are brought up, even in the first grade, singing the national anthem and the Pledge of Allegiance and all that, and it’s not until the seventh grade that they single us out as Mexicans. And from that point on, you realize you’re not an American. You’re a Mexican, and always will be. The Alamo story takes good, solid, loyal little American kids and it converts them into Mexicans.” And Mexican-American history isn’t the only piece of the past that’s distorted by the Alamo myth. Academic researchers long tiptoed around the issue of slavery in Texas; active research didn’t really begin until the 1980s. Since then, scholars such as Randolph Campbell and Andrew Torget have demonstrated that slavery was the single issue that regularly drove a wedge between early Mexican governments—dedicated abolitionists all—and their American colonists in Texas, many of whom had immigrated to farm cotton, the province’s only cash crop at the time. His correspondence shows conclusively that Stephen F. Austin, the so-called “Father of Texas,” spent years jousting with the Mexico City bureaucracy over the necessity of enslaved labor to the Texas economy. “Nothing is wanted but money,” he wrote in a pair of 1832 letters, “and Negros are necessary to make it.” Each time a Mexican government threatened to outlaw slavery, many in Austin’s colony began packing to go home. In time, as we know now, they put away their suitcases and brought out their guns. This, by and large, is not the Texas history many of us learned in school; instead, we learned a tale written by Anglo historians beginning in the 19th century. What happened in the past can’t change. But the way we view it does—and, as a state and a country, now is the time to teach the next generation our history, not our myths.  Penguin _Bryan Burrough and Jason Stanford are, with Chris Tomlinson, the authors of_ [Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth](https://bookshop.org/a/4973/9781984880093), _available now from Penguin Press._ --- **More from TIME History** The History You Didn’t Learn: Black Wall Streets **Correction, June 21** _The original version of this story misstated the name of the President of Mexico in 1835\. It was Antonio López de Santa Anna, not Jose Lopez de Santa Anna._ ## Transcript The legacies of black wall Street's, it's important for people to remember because there were so many people who have no idea that there were vital Dynamic places where African Americans were living out their vision of the American dream opportunity in Hope and progress of for their community. June 1st 2021 Marcel hundred years since the Tulsa Race Massacre, as many as 300, people were killed as an angry white mob, destroyed a prosperous black neighborhood in Tulsa. Oklahoma once known as that City's Black Wall Street story is part of a larger history of segregated prosperity in many American cities around the turn of the century. So ask Jim Crow begins to really take shape and African-Americans are forced into segregated parts of the city. These communities rise up in places like Durham North Carolina and Little Rock Arkansas, Jackson, Mississippi, and people began to notice that up there all kinds of businesses and services that grow there. And so they kind of take on the name Black Wall Street. One of the biggest and longest lasting black wall. Street's was in Richmond. Virginia. A neighborhood called Jackson Ward. So the factors that led to Richmond's being the cradle of black capitalism, lay in the diverse slave economy, that existed at that time. So you had African American who were involved and not just agricultural slavery but also an urban and Industrial slavery end after the Civil War II. Had this concentrated community of African Americans who have been working in the city in factories and it feels and rural areas around Richmond has continued to build the institutions and the community and the neighborhood that they had begun even before the war. And then you begin to have a lot of really important, but natural first, such as insurance companies and Banks, which really highlight Richmond as the first Black Wall Street. One of the most storied figures in Jackson Ward history was a banker and business woman named Maggie Lena Walker. You cannot study magazine Walker and not be fascinated you do with her, she was born in slaved in 1864 on, right? Towards the end of the Civil War, and really saw economic empowerment of African American women as the path forward Locker started, her banking career at a mutual Aid Society, called The Independent order of St, Luke 1867 St. Luke was established to help freed slaves. Gain economic independence in 1901 and she said, I'm specifically talking to the women here. Look, good women here. Whose money is in this organization and she was able to bring that Vision to fruition in 1903. When she became the first black woman Bank president. St. Luke Penny Savings Bank. Later named the Consolidated Bank and Trust was acquired in 2005, but Walker's home in Jackson. Ward is still standing. As you see around me, the homes have been restored on the outside while mrs. Walker's home. It's been restored to its full Glory as much as we could using artifacts that belong to Maggie Walker and her family, because we still get a lot of people who come in and do our chores, and they are still amazing. Why didn't I know about her before? Why have I not heard the story? And it is a story that has been preserved quite fully in Richmond itself, but not so much across the country. What is happening now in Jacksonville? Or is that those who remember, the stories are coming together to make sure that they are no longer for God neighborhood? We not look as it did when she walks these streets, but the memories are still there. In his Heyday, I imagine that it was a fabulous to live and Jackson board that you needed. You could get your in Jackson Ward, and I will just say walking into the st. Luke Bank on, I think had to be a treat. First of all, making me walk or made sure that he was beautifully appointed with mahogany and marble and I can just imagine a made of domestic. I'm working in a white person's home in another part of the city and she walks into the bank. And she's greeted probably didn't, but by not just her first name, but she's call miss or missus, and I just can't imagine that it is height Jackson, Ward was an incredible experience, but then there's also the dark side and that is that it is a segregated community. Magalina Walker accommodate segregation by real ending mostly in the segregated areas. Are so there I think in the midst of this in affluent and its dynamism. There's always that dark cloud of racism in Jim Crow that kind of just outside there is a a world that wants to continue to treat them as second-class Citizens. Jackson word with a Haven for black business for many years but like Tulsa was Black Wall Street. It to you came to an end, the difference between the end of Jackson, Ward, and the end of Tulsa, is really a difference in degree. And so for Jackson, Ward, it was more of a slow death. A wide range of factors caused Jackson Ward's, economic decline, including redlining, which kept Capital out of black neighborhoods, slum clearance, where City's raise old buildings without rebuilding in certain areas and a highway system that cut right through the neighborhood. But the final end to Jackson Ward's. Black Wall Street days, came on the heels of the civil rights movement and desegregation. So ironically at the very time that you begin to have opportunity at least legally for African Americans to have equal accommodation, to be able to get you no equal access to education is at the same time that these communities have been so undermined in the decades previous and so when they have choices to make, they in a move to the suburbs and the Really the most vulnerable and needy living in places like Jackson Ward. The occurrence of diminishing. Black wealth has a long history in our country. I mean really takes root in slavery. There you have hundreds and hundreds of years of unpaid black labor, and then be disenfranchised and their wealthy undermined and other ways. I think that we just really have to deal with this long-standing American exploitation of African Americans. You can go to your bank tomorrow and you can say until you as a corporation start to speak on our behalf. I want all my money in recent years, there has been a movement to reinvest funds into black Banks and businesses. One of the organizations advocating for this financial shift is Bank Black USA which helps people find and invest in Black banks for people to move their money from the larger institutions that had it. Maybe a history of discriminatory practices and predatory lending practices and move that money to in the eyes with their minority depository Institution. According to the FDIC mdi's are more likely to lend to lower and moderate-income communities and help promote economic viability in these areas, found out that black financial institutions are under supported in under capitalize, right? Black banks are in Decline. For example, there was like, Fifty of these institutions in 2001 and 2021 and very nearly 20, our solution was to create resources for people to be able to compare the banks and services, and financial help the community impact it. Because we do believe that these empty eyes. Can you play an integral role in closing that racial wealth Gap with the support? It if you don't learn about the origin and history of Blackwell, you'll fall into the Trap of thinking that there was no, Blackwell. The time to learn about Jackson would take time to learn about Durham a time to learn about Tulsa. Let's ring the stories for word, and remember those times of black Excellence, it can come again, if we follow the road now cuz they said before us, ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6072141/alamo-history-myths/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6072141/alamo-history-myths/"},"headline":"We've Been Telling the Alamo Story Wrong for Nearly 200 Years. 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