Resignations stalled memorial to civil rights activist

Two resignations in city government in 2022 and a lack of follow-up inquiries apparently caused a proposal for a downtown memorial to New Mexico civil rights icon and Tucumcari native Alice Faye Kent Hoppes to stall until her nephew revived the idea last month.

Former Tucumcari mayor Ruth Ann Litchfield admitted in a phone interview she “dropped the ball” with the plan to install the Hoppes memorial at Sands Dorsey Park downtown.

Litchfield said she took biographical information about from Hoppes’ nephew, Anthony Kent, in the spring of 2022 and passed it to the city manager at the time, Mark Martinez.

She recalled it would be a park bench or some other type of memorial at the downtown park.

Martinez resigned his position not long after that to take another position at Mesalands Community College.

Litchfield then became ill and resigned as mayor and District 3 commissioner in December 2022.

“That’s when I got sick,” she said last week. “I’m not saying anything bad about Mark. I just dropped the ball. I still think it would be a great idea.”

Litchfield said she still owned a folder full of information that Kent had gathered about Hoppes. She said she would give it to Paula Chacon, who became city manager in August 2022.

Kent brought up the idea for a Hoppes memorial during public comments at a Jan. 25 city commission meeting.

Kent admitted to also failing to follow up on the initial idea nearly two years ago, but he wanted to see it through.

“Nothing has ever been done” in Tucumcari about his late aunt, Kent said in an interview last week, noting the African American Pavilion at Expo New Mexico in Albuquerque is named after her.

“How can you not have one for somebody who was so predominant that grew up in this town?”

Kent said he several weeks ago saw a Facebook post about Hoppes, which spurred him to bring up the memorial plan again.

“Let’s get it done, you know?” he said.

Her origins

Hoppes for years was president of the Albuquerque branch of the NAACP and director of the Office of African American Affairs under Gov. Bill Richardson before her death from cancer at age 64. She also was a longtime member of the National Council or Negro Women.

Hoppes was born in Tucumcari in 1939, one of the daughters of Texas transplants Harold and Bessie Kent. Harold was a porter for the railroad.

She went to school in what she described in interviews as a “one-room shack” for Tucumcari’s black people on the city’s north side.

Hoppes’ sister, 85-year-old Haroldie K. Spriggs of Maryland, said in a phone interview last week that was an accurate description of that school on North Seventh Street.

Spriggs said she discovered during her master’s degree research years later that many eastern New Mexico schools were segregated at the time.

“A lot of those who settled in New Mexico came from Texas and Oklahoma in the Deep South, and they brought those attitudes and behaviors with them,” she said.

She said Tucumcari schools became racially integrated in 1952, about two years before the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, that outlawed segregation in public schools.

“They integrated the schools at the behest of my father and a few other blacks whose citizens petitioned the state to integrate the schools. Otherwise, I would have had to go to Clovis to go to high school” because Tucumcari offered no high school for black people at the time, Spriggs said.

Hoppes told the Albuquerque Journal in 1996 that a Tucumcari math teacher told a joke that used a racial slur in front of her.

“I would squirm and feel uncomfortable,” Hoppes said. “But one morning I’d had enough. I told him I didn’t appreciate his jokes, and that I was there to learn math, not to hear his derogatory remarks.”

The principal suspended Hoppes for three days, but she said the teacher no longer told such jokes.

Spriggs said she had a similar experience of slurs with that teacher. She also said black people continued to experience discrimination even after local schools were integrated.

“We would walk to school because they they didn’t have buses,” she said. “They never let us have buses.”

Those experiences led her sister to become an activist.

“I think what really what really, really brought her to the point of becoming a civil rights activist was the segregation that we experienced,” she said. “It makes me almost cry thinking about it.

“Like if we went to the Princess or the Odeon Theatre, we always had to sit in the balcony. She didn’t like that.”

Spriggs said black families in Tucumcari were all but required to live north of the railroad tracks.

“There was not one black person living on the south side during the time I grew up,” she said.

Tucumcari historically has seen a small black population. Spriggs could only recall 10 black families in town. In the 2020 U.S. Census, Tucumcari’s black or African American population was 4.3% — well below the national average of 13.6%.

Hoppes married and eventually moved to Albuquerque, where her civil rights activism began in earnest.

After Hoppes died in 2003, she was one of the few people whose body laid in state in the rotunda of the state capitol. She was buried in Sunset Memorial Park in Albuquerque.

Spriggs said she would travel to Tucumcari when a memorial to her sister is dedicated.

“I’m grateful that this is being done, particularly since we are natives of Tucumcari, grew up there, and we had some really great experiences as well with our with our white community,” she said.

“It’s about time. Even though we were under very stringent circumstances as far as segregation, we made it. Alice was a great part of that because she fought hard against segregation, not only against black people, but Native Americans and any disenfranchised group.”