The Alamo’s Racist Myth Of Heroism.

An award-winning journalist today blasted the new movie “The Alamo” as racist and perpetuating the myth of the Battle of the Alamo in San Antonio.

“The battle at the historic church in Texas was about independence from Mexico, but not about freedom. Just the opposite. It was a stand for slavery,” said Roger Hammer, author of “Hispanic America (The Place in the Woods, 1994) — Honoring Heroes, Freeing the Free.”

“Mexico abolished slavery in 1828, some 30 years before the United States. Americans who came from the southeastern U.S. to settle in Tejas, brought their slaves with them. They refused to free them under the new Mexican constitution and Santa Ana was sent north to enforce Mexican law,” Hammer said. “They wanted independence from Mexico so they could keep their slaves. Legendary Davy Crockett not only was an “Indian-fighter,” he also was a slave trader.”

One of the poignant scenes in the John Wayne “Alamo” was Crockett, on his death bed in the Alamo, giving his personal slave his freedom before the final charge, saying something to the affect, “You don’t have to die here with the rest of us,” Hammer said.

“The real freedom fighters at the Alamo were the Mexicans, but Hollywood portrays them as a terrible horde akin to Ghengis Kahn’s army. Not so, they were peasant farmers Santa Ana recruited along the march from the capital to San Antonio,” Hammer said.

As bureau chief for United Press International in Montgomery, Alabama during the civil rights movement of the 60s, Hammer won honors for such stories as the desegregation of the state’s mental health institutions, which Then Gov. George Wallace immediately ordered re-segregated after reading Hammer’s article.

“It’s time we tell history as it was, not through the eyes of persons who want to live as fantasy-Americans, always doing the right and heroic things. We don’t always get it right and the rest of the world knows that,” he said.