Alamo Plaza in Civil Rights History
Channel: NOWCastSA
Date: 2020-11-20

Everett Fly gave a presentation detailing the Civil Rights history of Alamo Plaza from 1883 to 1960 and said "it would be a huge mistake to demolish the Woolworth. African American history is embedded in Alamo Plaza."
Fly, Fellow of American Society of Landscape Architects, is an architect and landscape architect based in San Antonio. He studied architecture at UT Austin and was the first African-American graduate of the landscape architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Much of his work has been in the documentation and preservation of early African American building sites. President Barack Obama awarded him the National Humanities Medal in 2014. 
"Demolishing and erasing and marginalizing physical traces and presence of Black and ethnic history doesn't make the things that remain more important," Fly said near the conclusion of his presentation.
"It's a well-known military tactic, that if you want to demoralize or conquer people, you physically demolish their cultural, spiritual and physical landmarks - the landmarks that represent their ideas and beliefs," he said. 
"Eliminating tangible traces of people, some call that cultural cleansing."