On an unknown date in October 1962, Homer Garrison, Director of @TxDPS and Chief of the Texas Rangers, dressed in blackface for a work picnic and lampooned the @NAACP. A thread on Garrison and racism in the modern Rangers. CW: racist language and depictions.
Garrison’s importance to the Rangers is hard to overstate. He oversaw the transformation of the Rangers into a unit of the @TxDPS, which he ran for 30 years. He also approved a revised Ranger badge design – the badge still worn by Rangers today- in 1962, the same year as his performance. https://www.texasranger.org/texas-ranger-museum/popular-pages/beware-fake-badges/
At its opening in 1968, the @txrangermuseum was initially named after him. One of the museum’s galleries today bears his name, and just this year he was enrolled in the Hall of Fame
https://www.texasranger.org/texas-ranger-museum/museum-collections/hall-of-fame/homer-garrison-jr/
Garrison’s blackface minstrelsy drew on nearly a century of racist history. in which whites blackened their faces with burnt cork or shoe polish and portrayed Black people as “lazy, ignorant, superstitious, hypersexual, and prone to thievery and cowardice.” https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/blackface-birth-american-stereotype
Garrison appeared early in the 1962 DPS talent show. He came onto the stage in blackface and said “I represent the DPS chapter of the NAACP,” leading the other man on stage to immediately start laughing. https://texasarchive.org/2009_00902
“We had a meetin’ last night,” Garrison continued, “we think we’re entitled to the same privileges as anybody else.” The crowd titters and a second, unidentified man in blackface joins him, and the two banter.
About three minutes in, Garrison begins signing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a heavy dialect. The crowd applauds when the song ends, and an emcee comes on stage and says “we hope that we don’t have them with us again.”
As Texas’ lead law enforcement officer, Garrison had an obligation to enforce the law equally. Eight years earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down segregated schools as a violation of the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/brown-v-board-of-education
Yet to Garrison and others in the @TxDPS, the idea that Black people deserved the protection of the law was, literally, a joke. The laughter from the crowd shows that many in the DPS felt similarly. Worse, under his direction Rangers aided and abetted attacks on civil rights.
In 1956, Ranger Jay Banks declined to protect Black students attempting to enroll in high school at Mansfield and junior college in Texarkana from white mobs. https://x.com/Refusing2Forget/status/1642143914785230849?s=20
Banks’ comment that white members of the mob “were just salt-of-the earth citizens who had been stirred up by agitators” was consistent with Garrison’s lampooning of the @NAACP since that group was often blamed for being the proverbial outside agitator. https://www.star-telegram.com/news/local/arlington/article68837362.html
Later that year, Texas attorney general John Ben Shepperd obtained a restraining order against the @TexasNAACP , forcing branches to suspend operation, in what Thurgood Marshall called “the greatest crisis” in the organization’s history. https://timeline.com/two-little-known-events-in-texas-that-threatened-the-progression-of-the-civil-rights-movement-2d030f3018b2
In the 1960s, Ranger Captain A.Y. Allee brutalized numerous Mexican-American labor and civil rights leaders, including an 18 year old José Angel Gutiérrez. https://x.com/Refusing2Forget/status/1642143914785230849?s=20
Not until 1988 would the modern Rangers, under extensive pressure from the @NAACP, hire a Black officer. https://x.com/Refusing2Forget/status/1699399125400195253?s=20
Ranger defenders ignore instances like Garrison’s performance. Russell Molina called for an honest exploration of Ranger history, absurdly stating that they “aggressively defended the civil and due-process rights of African Americans” during Jim Crow. https://www.texasmonthly.com/opinion/examining-texas-rangers-history/
In 2020, Dallas authorities removed a statue modeled after Banks from Love Field. Molina, chair of the Ranger bicentennial commission, tells the press that he is seeking another location. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2023/09/13/they-didnt-like-his-book-on-the-texas-rangers-so-they-tried-to-smear-his-reputation/
In summer of 2023, the @txrangermuseum inducted Garrison into its Hall of Fame. His entry makes no mention of his blackface performance, Banks’ cooperation with mobs, or Allee’s thuggery.
https://www.texasranger.org/texas-ranger-museum/museum-collections/hall-of-fame/homer-garrison-jr/
Despite Molina’s call to “learn more about the Rangers” and “their whole history,” Ranger defenders appear to have learned nothing from the dark side of their history, since they won’t even acknowledge egregious incidents like this one. https://calendar.eji.org/about
