It's Not Only Cleveland and Atlanta. The Texas Rangers Are Named After A Racist "Death Squad" Who Terrorized Natives Americans, Mexicans, And Blacks For 130 Years

The owner of Washington, DC's NFL team stated last Monday that the team's racist slur of a nickname will be changed. It was a historic decision. Owner Daniel Synder had fiercely resisted all calls to change the name for more than two decades.

In major league baseball, Commissioner Rob Manfred has had periodic discussions with the owners of the Cleveland team about the retirement of their racist nickname (the team's super-duper racist logo is finally being phased out, but slowly). The team in Atlanta appears less willing to join the 20th Century, having discussed outlawing "the Chop" among fans in the stands, but that's about it.

Karen Attiah, the Global Opinions editor at the Washington Post, recently called attention to another baseball team which has "avoided the spotlight and resisted meaningful" discussions about its nickname, which has "violent and racist implications".

The Texas Rangers.

"While we may have originally taken our name from the law enforcement agency, since 1971 the Texas Rangers Baseball Club has forged its own, independent identity," the team said in a statement last month. "The Texas Rangers Baseball Club stands for equality. We condemn racism, bigotry and discrimination in all forms."

Attiah politely refers to this as revisionist history — and she says the team knows it. When the former Washington Senators were moving to Texas in 1971, there were protests against the "Rangers" name, but they were ignored.

In the early 1960s, The Rangers were still protecting white supremacy, preventing the integration of Texas schools. In 1967 — only four years before the baseball team would adopt their name — the Rangers were called in to violently break a farmworkers strike.

The baseball team is trusting that fans will not question its press release or explore the historical record themselves. So Attiah, who grew up in Dallas, has summarized that history. She concluding that, given a full historical understanding, one cannot escape the fact that the team might as well call itself the Texas Klansmen.

[T]he Rangers were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory. The first job of the Rangers, formed in 1835 after Texas declared independence from Mexico, was to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.

That was just the start. The Rangers oppressed black people, helping capture runaway slaves trying to escape to Mexico; in the aftermath of the Civil War, they killed free blacks with impunity. "The negroes here need killing," a Ranger wrote in a local newspaper in 1877, after Rangers fired on a party of black former Buffalo soldiers, killing four of them and a 4-year old girl. A jury would later find that the black soldiers "came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty," an unsettling echo of the justification for modern-day police killings.

In the early 20th century, Rangers played a key role in some of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history along the Texas-Mexico border. Mexicans were run out of their homes and subject to mass lynchings and shootings. The killings got so out of control that the federal government threatened to intervene.

In his new book, Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers, Doug J. Swanson writes, "In service to Anglo civilization's slow march, they functioned as executioners. Their job was to seize and hold Texas for the white man."

But Ranger racism is not an artifact of the distant past. Rangers would be called on to protect white supremacy into the 1960s, deployed to prevent school integration. In 1956, when black students were attempting to take classes at all-white Texarkana Junior College, Rangers stood by as the mob attacked them — and threatened to arrest the black students. For their efforts, Swanson writes, they were rewarded with a chicken dinner from the White Citizens' Council in Texarkana.

In anticipation of controversy from Swanson's book, Dallas city officials quietly removed a 12-foot-tall statue of Ranger Jay Banks, the commanding officer who oversaw the efforts to prevent school integration, from Love Field airport...

Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman, a native Texan, wrote last month that "without the history and the legends, the franchise would not have adopted the name".

In Cult of Glory, Swanson writes:

They were the violent instruments of repression. They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents. They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexican And Mexican Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South. They hunted runaway slaves for bounty. They violated international law with impunity.

As he told NPR:

[T]hey didn't invent police brutality, but they perfected it down there on the border, where they operated as what we would now term death squads. ... [T]hey executed hundreds, perhaps thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans. And some of those were bandits who had attacked white-owned farms and ranches, but many of them had committed no crimes. You know, they were guilty of having brown skin. ...

[T]hey were very skilled executioners on the behalf of the white power structure. They did fight Mexicans who might come across the border. They sometimes went across the border themselves to get cattle and other things. And they fought the Indians. They wiped the Cherokees out. They wiped out some other tribes. And then they had to fight the Comanches, who were [a] much more difficult battle. ...

The Rangers were really valuable to the U.S. Army. ... [T]heir role often was as scouts, advanced troops, guerrilla forces because they knew what it was like to fight in the desert Southwest. They knew the turf. And they were extraordinarily tough. So they played a very valuable role for the United States forces during the Mexican War. At the same time, the Rangers were motivated by their hatred of Mexicans. They blamed the Mexicans for any number of atrocities, including the Alamo, and they were out for revenge. So they quickly established a reputation as the Los Diablo Tejanos, the Texas devils. They executed any number of innocent people. They would move into small villages and shoot every man in the village, innocent or not. They were extremely feared by the Mexicans during the Mexican War.

Those Texas Rangers will be celebrating their 200th anniversary in 2023.