July 19, 2020

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.

9 comments:

Dr. Jeff said...

What about the Padres?

TheRef said...

"The owner of Washington, DC's NFL team stated last Monday that the team's racist slur of a nickname will be changed." - THIS STATEMENT IS AN OUT AND OUT LIE! The owner did NOT make that statement. The owner did say that the name of the team would be changed but the rest of the sentence, as FALSELY PURPORTED, is a LIE. Once again, I suggest that you leave your ultra-Libertard views aside and just deal with baseball, not your distorted political views. Either way, STOP LYING!

allan said...

TheRef said...
"The owner of Washington, DC's NFL team stated last Monday that the team's racist slur of a nickname will be changed." - THIS STATEMENT IS AN OUT AND OUT LIE! The owner did NOT make that statement. The owner did say that the name of the team would be changed but the rest of the sentence, as FALSELY PURPORTED, is a LIE. Once again, I suggest that you leave your ultra-Libertard views aside and just deal with baseball, not your distorted political views. Either way, STOP LYING!


Awwww, a liddle snowflake got his feelings hurt.

tim said...

Haha! Good stuff up there ^

Jere said...

""The owner of Washington, DC's NFL team stated last Monday that the team's racist slur of a nickname will be changed." - THIS STATEMENT IS AN OUT AND OUT LIE! The owner did NOT make that statement."

You're seeing quotation marks where there aren't any. (Why would Allan want to make his readers think Snyder actually admitted the name is racist?)

Liam Pravarde said...

Language is a fluid thing. I'd argue many people probably think "Rangers" are the team in Texas and know little to nothing about the law enforcement agency. Meaning changes over time. Many words with everyday usage ("gay," "naughty," "meat") had different definitions when originally used, so why can't "Rangers" be among them?

allan said...

I'd argue many people probably think "Rangers" are the team in Texas and know little to nothing about the law enforcement agency. ... Many words ... had different definitions when originally used, so why can't "Rangers" be among them?

Ignorance of a fact does not make that fact disappear. The team chose to use the name of what a historian refers to as a "death squad" that murdered thousands of innocent people. Those Rangers were participating in racist activities only four years before the team debuted. There were protests when the name was chosen because many people knew its racist history (which, as mentioned, was still going on only a couple of years prior) and knew what the team was purposefully deciding to celebrate. The team said "fuck you" to everyone who thought naming a baseball team after a local racist organization that murdered, raped, and tortured people for 130 years was maybe not the best idea. Did you not read the post?

How about a team called the Kentucky Klansmen? They are using the word "clan" ("a group of people with a strong common interest"), but spelling it with a K because alliteration. Sure, there used to be a group of racists called the Klan, but they don't really exist much publicly anymore. Burning crosses and lynchings are pretty much a thing of the past. I'd argue many younger people probably know little to nothing about the use of those forms of terrorism. If you like "the Chop", you're gonna love showing your support for the Klan by wearing a white pointy cap. It also comes in camo!

Also, "naughty"'s original meaning dates back to the 1300s. Its current meaning has been around since roughly 1630. A dubious example, in this case. ... But I'll make a deal. Let's say the meaning changed in 1630: 390 years ago. I won't complain if the Texas baseball team stops using "Rangers" right now but picks it up again in 2410.

Liam Pravarde said...

That's true. Ignorance does not make it disappear. But in this case, ignorance does no harm, either.

How a historian refers to the term is not nearly as important as what the current meaning of the word entails. There are any number of historians who can tell you the true origin of the swastika, for example. In our current milieu, however, it does not matter. It has come to mean one thing. The "Rangers" are the opposite. Most people think of a law enforcement agency or the baseball team in Texas. As I said, that ignorance does no harm.

Yes, I read the post. But what is your point? It shouldn't have happened? Well, it did. I don't see any studies or anecdotes showing that the name inspires or influences people to partake in those activities today. Quite frankly, I don't think it's even deniable that movies and music have caused more criminal behavior than the name of the baseball team in Arlington. So it seems much ado about nothing.

We can talk about "the Kentucky Klansmen" when they have their first game. Right now they exist only in your mind, where I hope they stay.

I'll stop "chopping" when General Mills changes the Lucky Charms box. Just kidding. I don't care how some soulless corporate entity trivializes my ancestors. I know, I'm strange like that. I feel I should be upset, but I just can't muster the energy to care. I've got so much else to do.

I named the first three examples from the top of my head. I'd actually argue that proves my point - words change their meaning over time and always have. Even in 1630. I'm sure people back then were agitated about the youths and their ignorance of the word's original meaning.

There is no "deal," it's not my team, or yours. You can complain all your want and they can do what they want with the name. But if that were your offer, I'd counter with this: The word "gay" and its meaning of "homosexual" has become prominent during your lifetime. 'The Flinestones' were using it to mean "happy" as late as the 60s. Have you ever used the word to describe someone's sexuality? If so, you clearly concede words can change their meaning in a short time span. So I guess "Rangers" is the new "gay."

allan said...

Ignorance is rarely a good thing, even when it causes little or no harm. It's obvious the front offices in Cleveland and Atlanta (and management of any team with Native American-based nicknames) counted on massive ignorance over the years as they claimed their logos and chants were actually signs of respect and displays of honor.

I never stated that words could not "change their meaning in a short time span".

Thanks for your comments. However, I am not interested in having a debate.