#OTD on June 9-10, 1969, the Subcommittee on Migratory Labor met in Washington DC to examine labor abuses on migrant workers. The post meeting report, “Migrant and Seasonal Worker Powerlessness” exposed Ranger abuse of striking workers in Starr County. The meetings and report focused on the southwest and esp Texas. One of the first to […]
#OTD under the direction of Leander Harvey McNelly, a group of Texas Rangers attacked Mexican men moving cattle ten miles north of the Rio Grande who were supposedly herding cattle stolen from white ranchers. 12 of the Mexican men were killed, of somewhere between 12 and 14 total, and their bodies were publicly displayed in
#OTD on June 12, 1901 Gregorio Cortéz killed 2 Texas law officers in self-defense and led Texas Rangers on a nearly 10 day chase through south central Texas. Cortez was regarded as a “bandit” by the law but became a hero to many Mexican Americans. Cortéz was born in Mexico and moved to Texas in
#OTD June 16, 1901, a large posse in search of Gregorio Cortez lynched an unnamed Mexican man near Belmont for suspicion of harboring Cortez, in an act of violence that shows the connections between mob violence and law enforcement. The events that brought Cortez to fame, and prompted widespread violence against Mexican-American communities in central
Rangers Captain Sam McMurry, from Company B, was sent to Thumber, Texas in the Spring of 1889 to take stock of an ongoing conflict between T&PCC management and its miners. T&PCC’s workers, primarily miners, were on strike and demanding better working conditions. McMurry had been sent by Adjutant General King to the strike to prevent
In late June 1914 #TexasRangers Ira Cline and H.L. Roberson killed Carlos Morales Wood, editor of the Spanish language newspaper La Patria Mexicana published in Valentine, TX, while he supposedly resisted arrest. Cline and Roberson had a warrant for Wood’s arrest for the crime of “inciting riot” for “publishing articles in his paper purporting to
#OTD in 1979, the University of Notre Dame Press published “Gunpowder Justice: A Reassessment of the Texas Rangers,” by Julian Samora, Joe Bernal, and Albert Peña. The book surveys Ranger history from 19th century frontier violence to the Mexican American civil rights struggles to which the authors had contributed. “The victims of the Rangers .
#OTD June 30, 1893 John Hughes was promoted to Captain of Company D of the Texas Rangers, bringing a more equitable and collaborative approach to border policing in west Texas. In the late 1800s, smuggling was a common occurrence in the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez borderlands.. The so-called (H)olguin or Bosque Gang controlled smuggling and other
#OTD in 1923, the Ku Klux Klan attempted to kidnap farmer and rail worker Otto Lange from his front porch in Burleson County. The resulting case shows the complicated relationship between Rangers and the Klan. Lange was with his elderly mother and young daughter when the Klan arrived. When he resisted, Klansmen pistol-whipped his mother,
#OTD on July 8, 1945, Bee County Sheriff Vail Ennis, with Texas Ranger Frank Probst and another deputized man, shot and killed brothers Felix, Domingo, and Antonio Rodriguez. Ennis mowed them down with a Thompson submachine gun. A fourth brother, Geronimo, was injured. Sheriff Ennis had a long history of abuse and killing. He had
