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Kate Rogers, the former president and CEO of Alamo Trust Inc., said Davy Crockett and the historic defenders of the Alamo would have supported her after she was forced out from leading the restoration of the San Antonio battlefield and old Spanish mission.
“It just feels so fundamentally un-American,” Rogers said during an interview on TPR’s "The Source" on Monday. “Tyranny was the exact thing they were fighting against,” she said.
Rogers is suing Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham and others claiming her right to free speech was violated because she was essentially fired for writing in her doctoral dissertation that a complete history should be included in telling the story of the Alamo.
Rogers was forced out of her job after Texas’ Republican leadership focused on language from her doctoral dissertation to argue she was “incompatible” with the state’s preferred, battle-centered narrative of the Alamo.
Rogers resigned in October 2025 after Patrick publicly demanded her departure and Buckingham condemned a separate Alamo social media post as “woke.”
Speaking on TPR’s "The Source" Rogers described a lifelong connection to the shrine that began with family trips. “I still have a picture … of my sister and I when we were little on one of the many trips … my father took us to go see the Alamo,” she said, describing her father as a West Point graduate and five-tour Vietnam veteran.
She said she later learned an even deeper tie: “I did not know until I started working there that I actually am a descendant.” She traced her family lineage to one of the original Canary Island settler families in San Antonio. Rogers said her ancestor Maria Jesus Delgado “was nine and she was here during the siege of the Alamo” and left an account in a Tejano recollections book.
Rogers’ resignation followed a cascade of political blowback that began with an Indigenous Peoples Day/Columbus Day post on the Alamo’s official channels. Rogers said the post which paired “Happy Indigenous Peoples Day” with “Happy Columbus Day” and referenced a future “Indigenous Peoples Gallery” triggered Buckingham to denounce the message and tighten oversight. Buckingham wrote that “woke has no place at the Alamo,” and described the post as unacceptable.
About a week after the social media controversy, Rogers said her 2023 dissertation “came to light.” She described a phone call from Patrick, who she said told her that “someone that cares about him” had sent him the dissertation and that he took offense to passages about “historical reconciliation.” Patrick publicly characterized her academic writing as “troubling,” arguing that her views conflicted with what he said Texans expect from the Alamo: a focus on the 1836 battle and the “liberty or death” narrative.
Rogers has emphasized that the dissertation was written as a private citizen and did not govern her work at the Alamo, noting that she received a positive performance review from the board and was promoted from executive director to president and CEO shortly before the controversy.
The Alamo is in the middle of a major redevelopment that includes a new visitor center and museum planned to open in 2027, part of a broader, state-backed effort to transform the Alamo campus and interpretive experience.
The dispute over Rogers’ leadership has become a proxy battle over what “the full history” should mean and whether it includes the site’s long pre-1836 past as Mission San Antonio de Valero, the role of Indigenous peoples and Tejanos, and the complex place of slavery in the Texas Revolution.
Rogers said critics portrayed her writing as evidence she was advancing a “personal agenda,” and she believes it was “twisted, taken out of context …turned into a weapon,” especially in a climate where bots and opposition researchers can “cull through” academic work.
Those dynamics, she argued, are chilling, not only for museum professionals, but for educators and scholars generally.
Rogers’s federal lawsuit is alleging she was retaliated against for protected speech and that her forced resignation amounted to a First Amendment violation.
Rogers also goes further, framing her ouster as a warning sign for democratic culture. She compared the suppression of intellectual thought to “the playbook” of authoritarian regimes and called it “fundamentally un-American.”
She argued the Alamo’s famous defenders — including Davy Crockett — would have rejected efforts to punish speech. She added that the struggle over freedom and power “from the American Revolution through the Texas Revolution…we’re still living with it today.”
Rogers admits her legal battle will be an uphill struggle since Patrick and Buckingham are both elected officials they are indemnified and protected against personal lawsuits. However, she plans to continue the fight to seek justice and defend freedom, in keeping with her comparison, because that’s that the Alamo is all about.
