‘East Texas Troubles’ lifts Pine Curtain on nasty Depression-era gang
Until now, the annals of Depression-era crime have overlooked one of the most remarkable, and practically forgotten, chapters of East Texas history.
Granted, they’re already crowded with colorful bootleggers, bank robbers and tax evaders such as Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd and of course homegrown outlaw folk heroes Bonnie and Clyde. But the McClanahan-Burleson gang, which had the pineshaded county of San Augustine under its thumb for years, deserves a spot in those notorious ranks.
To break that grip required the intervention of the Texas Rangers, at a time when Deep East Texas was a Faulknerian environment rife with poverty and racial oppression (and the Rangers themselves’ reputation was rather sullied). But freshly appointed by a reform-minded governor, a handful of upright lawmen not only ended the McClanahanBurleson reign of terror but — in the courtroom, at least — managed to buck the deeply entrenched Jim Crow system to boot.
Or, as “East Texas Troubles” author Jody Edward Ginn explains, “in 1935, in Deep East Texas, white juries convicted white men solely on the testimony of black victims and witnesses.”
A former law-enforcement officer who now teaches at Austin Community College, Ginn had been impressing his historian colleagues with these findings for a while. Whenever he’d mention what happened in San Augustine, “their heads (would) explode,” Ginn says. “So I knew that’s gotta be the opening paragraph of the book.”
But “East Texas Troubles” began long before Ginn’s dissertation, which became the foundation of his book. Instead, it started with a set of engraved pistols given to Dan Hines, one of the Rangers who helped bust up the M-B gang, by the grateful citizens of San Augustine. These pistols were also a family heirloom: Hines was baby brother to Ginn’s great-grandmother.
Flash-forward to his tenure in the Hays County Constable’s Office, when Ginn mentioned his illustrious ancestry to the local Texas Ranger, a man named Tommy Ratliff.
“I said, ‘I’ve got this ancestor who was apparently a Ranger; if I wanted to look into that, where would I start?’ ” he recalls. “He gave me some pointers, and it took off from there. And it turned into a midlife career change.”
In “East Texas Troubles,” shaking down their black neighbors for money and property — a mule here, a set of tools there — was
just the beginning of the M-B gang’s nefarious activity. After one African-American bootlegger refused to share his profits, three assailants stormed his home in the middle of the night and shot him as he sleepily emerged from his bedroom.
Nor were their victims exclusively black. A Secret Service agent, in the area to investigate rumored counterfeiting activity (yet another M-B criminal enterprise), was badly beaten in the middle of the county fairgrounds. Edward Brackett Sr., a prominent local farmer, was ambushed with a shotgun as he drove into town. He had already clashed with the gang more than once, so Brackett’s wife had insisted their daughter, Vivian, go along — thinking him less likely to be attacked with a child present. Vivian had already left the car to go meet up with friends.
Soon enough almost no one in town was willing to stand up to the gang, let alone testify against its members in court. Leading law-enforcement officials were either terrified of the gang, in its thrall or — thanks to the “special Ranger” commissions governors including Ma Ferguson freely granted to their political supporters — members of the gang themselves. (These corrupt cops became known as “Ferguson Rangers.”)
Then attached to the Adjutant General’s office (aka the state military arm), the Rangers were full of such political appointments and, not coincidentally, some pretty shady characters. As legendary Ranger Manuel “Captain Lone Wolf ” Gonzaullas once noted, politicians like Ferguson “had to pardon their Rangers before they appointed them.”
(Side note: In Netflix’s recent Bonnie and Clyde film, “The Highwaymen,” on which Ginn worked as a consultant, Ferguson — played by Kathy Bates — gleefully greets a roomful of would-be donors with, “Get out your checkbooks, boys!”)
“They start handing them out to (essentially) the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker,” Ginn says of these commissions. “Nobody’s supervising these people, and that’s what you had in San Augustine.”
That all changed when James Allred was elected governor. A onetime prosecutor from Wichita Falls who went on to become state attorney general, Allred made fighting corruption in law enforcement a central plank of his campaign platform. Under his administration, the Rangers were combined with the Highway
Patrol in the newly created Department of Public Safety.
“The missions of law enforcement and the military are very distinct, and when you gray those lines, that can be problematic,” Ginn says, “especially when there’s not clear laws like we have today, which there weren’t as many.
“This solidified that transition that had been going on, into where (the Rangers) are now a true and fully law-enforcement entity,” he adds.
Because Allred’s personal secretary was from San Augustine — more like a chief of staff today, Ginn explains — the new governor sent a handful of freshly commissioned, hand-picked “Allred Rangers” (including Hines) there the day after his inauguration. Their orders were to bring the M-B gang to heel.
“Which kind of tells you how serious of an issue that was for them, that that was their focus from Day 1,” Ginn notes.
Although the criminals’ hold on San Augustine had lasted for years, Ginn says, the Allred Rangers were able to depose the gang in a matter of weeks. In the end, they took the remaining leaders into custody without further bloodshed, then stuck around town for several months to keep the peace and ensure witnesses’ safety during the subsequent trials.
Going through those trial records, Ginn says, made him realize the extent to which the M-B gang had terrorized San Augustine’s African-American community. It turned out that Edward Clark, the adviser who had alerted Gov. Allred to the problems in his hometown — and later became one of Texas’ top power brokers, instrumental in the rise of Lyndon B. Johnson’s political fortunes — shared his name with a black farmer who had been extorted by the gang.
“This story became much deeper and much more significant once I realized that basically (the gang) built their power on exploiting Jim Crow,” Ginn says. “(They were) taking advantage of marginalized African-Americans who, under that system, weren’t typically allowed access to the courts for redress of crimes committed by whites.”
Many incidents in these transcripts matched up with the stories he’d been hearing from the community, Ginn adds. But when the white defendants appealed their guilty verdicts, in some cases all the way to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals — as far as a case can get in this state — they were largely upheld.
Furthermore, “in no way did they ever indicate any dismissiveness in terms of the claims and experiences of the AfricanAmerican victims,” Ginn notes. “I think the violence got so out of control that the community had finally had enough.”
This disruption in the Jim Crow dynamic remained fairly limited in scope, however. After the verdicts came down, Ginn points out, blacks and whites both celebrated at the county fairgrounds — just on different days.
And in Deep East Texas, behind the so-called “Pine Curtain,” de facto segregation continued decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. Nevertheless, after the Allred Rangers’ cleanup, “blatant criminal acts (against African-Americans) were no longer tolerated” in Texas, Ginn says.
“That’s the only thing that changed and had a lasting effect,” he adds. “Which is a big deal.”
Chris Gray is a Houston-based writer.
‘East Texas Troubles: The Allred Rangers’ Cleanup of San Augustine’ By Jody Edward Ginn University of Oklahoma Press 210 pages, $29.95