FROM HONOR TO HONESTY: The History of the Texas Rangers and Black and Brown Communities. By Rev. Kyev P. Tatum, Sr., Ministers Justice Coalition of Texas

FROM HONOR TO HONESTY: The History of the Texas Rangers and Black and Brown Communities. By Rev. Kyev P. Tatum, Sr., Ministers Justice Coalition of Texas

There are moments in history when a community must decide not just what it celebrates—but what it is willing to confront.

This is one of those moments.

At Globe Life Field, a publicly funded stadium meant to bring people together, stands a symbol that tells only part of the story: a polished narrative of courage, order, and Texas pride tied to the mythology of the Texas Rangers name. But beneath that mythology lies a deeper truth—one that cannot be ignored, dismissed, or hidden behind ceremony. The historical record shows that the Texas Rangers have been celebrated as heroic lawmen, while scholars, archives, and official historical markers also document episodes of anti-Mexican violence, segregation enforcement, and the capture of enslaved people seeking freedom.  

To say that out loud is not to deny that policing is difficult. Even early police reformer August Vollmer wrote in 1926 that the officer is criticized from every direction and asked to perform impossible duties with too little support. That part of the story is real. Policing has always involved danger, judgment, and contradiction. But that truth does not erase another truth: in America, law enforcement has also too often been used to preserve racial hierarchy, protect unequal power, and discipline Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. From slave patrols in the South to Jim Crow enforcement to border violence in Texas, the badge has too often carried both authority and injury.  

That is why this conversation cannot be reduced to whether one “supports police” or “opposes police.” This is not about contempt for law enforcement. It is about honesty in public memory. It is about whether a modern stadium should function as a shrine to a myth while the fuller record remains buried in footnotes, court opinions, family testimony, and neglected archives. The Texas Rangers today are part of the Texas Department of Public Safety and serve modern investigative functions, but their official history also traces the force back to 1823, placing the present agency in direct continuity with the institution whose earlier conduct is now under renewed scrutiny.  

THE CONTRADICTION WE CAN NO LONGER IGNORE

Each year, America pauses to honor Jackie Robinson—a man who broke barriers, challenged injustice, and forced a nation to confront its contradictions.

Jackie Robinson Day is not just a celebration.

It is a moral checkpoint.

And yet, in the shadow of that observance, a statue remains—representing a legacy tied not only to law enforcement, but to systems that often enforced racial order rather than racial justice. That contradiction is especially sharp because the same historical record that celebrates Ranger bravery also includes the Rangers’ role in suppressing Black and Mexican American freedom. Historians and archival projects have documented their participation in the capture of enslaved people seeking freedom, their role in terror along the border, and their presence in school desegregation crises.  

You cannot celebrate the breaking of barriers while honoring symbols built during the enforcement of those very barriers.

That is not unity.

That is contradiction.

THE FULL STORY OF THE TEXAS RANGERS

For generations, the Texas Rangers have been portrayed as defenders of justice, icons of the frontier, and legends of American storytelling. Popular culture helped canonize that image for decades, while official and commemorative histories often emphasized courage and endurance.  

But history, when told in full, tells a more complicated truth.

The record includes the Rangers’ pursuit of enslaved Black people seeking freedom in Mexico and their role in a wider slaveholding order. It includes the dispossession and killing of Native peoples. It includes anti-Mexican violence so severe that the Texas Historical Commission’s Porvenir marker states that J. T. Canales charged the Rangers with “the oppression and murder of hundreds of ethnic Mexicans along the Rio Grande.”  

One of the clearest examples is the 1918 Porvenir massacre. Texas historical authorities and widely cited histories now recognize that Rangers, along with U.S. cavalrymen and local ranchers, killed fifteen Mexican men and boys in Porvenir; the remaining residents fled, and the town was abandoned. No one was criminally convicted. The event later became part of the 1919 Canales investigation into Ranger abuses.  

The record also reaches into the era of segregation. After Brown v. Board of Education held that segregated public education violated equal protection, Texas Ranger Jay Banks was sent to Mansfield High School, where Rangers blocked integration and Banks stood outside the school as a Black effigy hung nearby. A preserved photograph documents that scene.  

And in the 1960s, the Rangers again appeared in a racialized conflict, this time in the Starr County melon strike. The Supreme Court later upheld relief against Ranger interference with farmworkers’ constitutional rights in Allee v. Medrano, and historical accounts tied Ranger Captain A. Y. Allee to the use of excessive force against strikers and clergy supporting them.  

This is not speculation.

This is documented history.

And history—if it is to heal us—must be told in full.

FROM HONOR TO HONESTY

The question before us is not whether this history should be remembered.

It absolutely should.

But where—and how—we remember it matters.

There is a difference between honoring a legacy and examining a legacy.

One celebrates.

The other teaches.

A stadium is a place of applause. A museum is a place of interpretation. A ballpark concourse is designed for spectacle, not scrutiny. It does not ask visitors to wrestle with archival evidence, contested memory, legislative investigations, or the testimony of descendants. It invites admiration.

That is why this moment does not call for erasure. It calls for relocation and recontextualization.

If Texas wants to tell the Rangers’ story truthfully, then let it be told in a place built for public history. The Bullock Texas State History Museum is, in fact, a major Texas history institution devoted to exhibitions and educational programming about the story of Texas. A museum context allows difficult history to be presented with records, timelines, voices, contradictions, and consequences.  

In a museum, history can breathe.

It can be questioned.

It can be understood.

In a place of honor at a stadium—it is simply glorified.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Public spaces funded by the people must reflect the dignity of all people.

Not selective memory.

Not partial truth.

Not sanitized history.

The presence of this statue at Globe Life Field is not just about the past. It is about the civic message sent in the present.

It speaks to Black children learning about citizenship and justice.

It speaks to Latino families whose ancestors survived terror along the border.

It speaks to Native communities whose displacement is too often retold as frontier romance.

It speaks to a nation still wrestling with what truth and reconciliation actually require.

What do we honor?

What do we ignore?

What do we choose to elevate?

These are not abstract questions. Plessy v. Ferguson gave legal cover to segregation; Brown rejected it. Texas did not simply inherit those contradictions from the nation in the abstract. The Rangers were on the ground when those contradictions were enforced.  

A MOVEMENT, NOT A MOMENT

That is why the North Texas Civil Rights Collective has called for an economic withdrawal.

Not out of hatred.

Not out of division.

But out of conviction:

Alignment matters.

Truth matters.

Justice matters.

“We will not return until the statue comes down.”

That is not a call to destroy history. It is a call to stop confusing myth with memory. It is a call to tell the truth about what public honor means. The same Texas that can preserve the Rangers’ legacy can also preserve the truth about the people injured by that legacy. The same state that celebrates courage can also acknowledge cruelty. The same public that loves baseball can also love honesty.

This is not about tearing down history.

It is about lifting up truth.

THE PATH FORWARD

We are not calling for silence.

We are calling for honest conversation.

We are not calling for erasure.

We are calling for proper placement.

Let Globe Life Field be a place where Jackie Robinson’s legacy is honored without contradiction, where families can gather without the weight of a myth placed above their pain, and where unity is not merely advertised but demonstrated.

And let a museum be the place where the full story is told:

where the frontier legend is placed beside the archive,

where Ranger mythology is placed beside Canales, Porvenir, Mansfield, and Starr County,

where reflection replaces myth,

and where education replaces glorification.  

FINAL WORD

History must not be hidden.

But neither should it be misrepresented.

There is a place for every story.

The question is not whether we remember.

The question is how we remember.

Will we continue to place contested power on a pedestal and call it pride?

Or will we finally choose the harder, holier path—

from honor to honesty?

ABOUT REV. KYEV P. TATUM, SR.

Rev. Kyev P. Tatum, Sr. is the Senior Pastor of New Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, and President of the Ministers Justice Coalition of Texas. He is widely known for his prophetic public witness, his commitment to taking “the church to the streets,” and his work at the intersection of faith, justice, public health, education, and community transformation.

Through preaching, organizing, writing, and advocacy, Pastor Tatum has consistently challenged institutions to confront hard truths while building pathways toward dignity, healing, and accountability. His work has addressed civil rights, youth violence, public health disparities, trauma-informed care, community development, and the preservation of Black history in Texas.

A graduate of the University of North Texas School of Community Service, Pastor Tatum continues to call Texas—and America—to a deeper moral reckoning: one rooted not in selective memory, but in courageous truth.