San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A long overdue departure from Love Field
Last week, while protesters continued to march across America, a ghost of Texas’ past quietly slipped out of sight from Dallas’ Love Field.
It was in the shape of a 12-foot bronze statue of a Texas Ranger.
The statue was the work of San Antonio sculptor Waldine Tauch, who also created the bas-relief of the American Indian that has stood on the Commerce Street Bridge for more than 100 years.
The live model for Tauch’s Texas Ranger sculpture was E.J. “Jay” Banks, who appears in news photos from 1956 in front of a high school in the small town of Mansfield. In the images, Banks is standing by while an effigy of a black person on a noose hangs above the front door of the school as a group of young white men mill about. The story goes that the Ranger was assigned to the school because black kids were trying to enroll; after a mob formed, they didn’t enroll after all.
While some might argue that Banks failed to do his job, others might argue he did exactly what he was expected to do in that era. He wasn’t assigned to escort the kids into a segregated school; he was there to keep them out.
The statue and Banks’ work are described in “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.” The author, Doug J. Swanson, writes about how the Rangers, originally a group of 10 men hired by Stephen F. Austin to protect white settlers from Karankawa attacks in 1823, became a force that terrorized people of color along the borderlands acting in what we would now call death squads.
The stories of Texas Ranger misdeeds, which existed side by side with tales of daring and rescue, told two sides of the same group of men: Those charged with keeping order also hunted runaway slaves and targeted people who had done nothing more than not be white.
Swanson’s book isn’t the first to point this out. In the award-winning “The Justice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas,” Monica Muñoz Martinez tells of a time, between 1910 and 1920, when vigilantes, rogues and even the Texas Rangers intimidated and killed Mexican residents with no consequence. Oral history had kept this side of history alive, but Martinez brought those stories together with institutional and private archives to tell a more complete story of South Texas as it went from being Mexican ranchland that sustained communities year-round to agrarian farmland owned by newcomers who only provided seasonal work to families who had lived there for generations.
And the 1918 massacre of 15 men and boys at the hands of Texas Rangers, Army soldiers and local ranchers in the small West Texas town of Porvenir was not only documented on a Texas historical marker outside Marfa in July 2019 but retold in a PBS documentary in October.
It wasn’t the release of “Cult of Glory” that sparked the removal of the statue at Love Field, but it played a part in uncovering another piece of already well-documented Texas history. And just like the removal of Confederate statues and renaming of institutions honoring Confederate heroes, doing so is not an attempt to erase history. Nothing can ever erase what was done to the people who lived in Texas before it was claimed by white settlers at the hands of the state; nothing can erase images of law enforcement officers standing by while kids are kept from going to school 100 years after that.
And removing the statue of the Ranger isn’t an action against the Texas Rangers of today. The goal, instead, is to stand against white supremacy, the idea that one group stands above all others. This idea belongs in museums and history books, not enshrined in bronze in a place of honor.
That isn’t who we are anymore, and it is one of the reasons we’re hurting as a nation.
That’s why we need to confront these stories. That is why, sources say, San Antonio College no longer wants the Ranger as its mascot. And that is why that departure at Love Field is long overdue.