SAN ANTONIO — Cheryl Wyatt lived in an era when segregation was at its peak. 

“You couldn’t sit at certain places. I asked why. They said, 'Well, that’s the way it is in Texas,'” Wyatt said. 

She had to sit on the back of the bus and wasn’t allowed go through the front doors of establishments in downtown San Antonio. 

“Go to the movies at the Majestic Theatre — that was another place we can't go through the front; we had to go around the back,” Wyatt said. 

She also wasn’t allowed to sit a lunch counters at places such as Woolworth.

“The waitress came over [and said], 'You need to get your blankety, blank up, you are not supposed to be sitting here,'” Wyatt recalled. 

She was also a part of history when she skipped enchilada Wednesday — a San Antonio public school staple — to witness the Woolworth and six other lunch counters be the first establishments in the south to peacefully integrate and serve Black folks. 

“We did get to see some of the men went and sit down and they served them,” Woolworth said. 

Wyatt went to a historically Black college and became an educator. 

“Educate the kids on things that’s not in the textbooks, they won’t put in the books, things that Blacks have achieved from slavery and on,” Wyatt said. 

Preserving Black history is a priority of hers, and now that she’s retired, her main concern is the Alamo Visitors Center and Museum, which will house the San Antonio Civil Rights exhibit.

“I think it would be a disservice and an injustice not to show what we went through, and what I went through, what my family went through as Black Americans in San Antonio,” Wyatt said in a recent City Council meeting. 

The project won’t be complete until 2026. 

The Alamo Trust told Spectrum News 1 that there aren't even renderings yet, but a major question Wyatt wants answered is who is going to decide what’s going in the museum.

Ernesto Rodriguez, senior curator and historian at the Alamo, has an answer to that. 

“We have several committees of citizens coming in, we have scholars, we have community activists,” Rodriguez said. 

Those committees have subcommittees to decide what’s going inside Chicano, Indigenous and civil rights museums. 

“We are able to gather that information so that everyone has a voice,” Rodriguez said. 

Wyatt understands tons of people come to San Antonio to visit the Alamo and views it as an opportunity to tell the true Black history. 

“I hope they do pick the right person to put the right stuff, to tell the truth about San Antonio and the Black community,” Rodriguez said.