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12. The Texas Rangers didn't invent police brutality, says the author of a new book, 'they perfected it'

Doug J. Swanson documents the history of the state’s leading law enforcement agency in ‘Cult of Glory.'

https://www.dallasnews.com/arts-entertainment/books/2020/06/03/the-texas-rangers-didnt-invent-police-brutality-says-the-author-of-a-new-book-they-perfected-it/



Doug J. Swanson’s new book arrives at an extraordinary time in American history. Its official publication date is June 9, barely two weeks removed from the killing of George Floyd. A 46-year-old black man, Floyd died in police custody after a white officer pinned him to the ground with a knee to his neck, igniting protests across the country.

Swanson’s new book is Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers, who began in 1823 as a 10-man volunteer squad raised to protect the first American settlers in the Mexican territory of Texas. The Rangers, in Swanson’s words, “functioned as executioners” whose “job was to seize and hold Texas for the white man.” In the same way that author Gerald Posner’s latest book, Pharma, arrived on March 10, three days before the coronavirus provoked a national emergency, and with one of its chapters titled “The Coming Pandemic,” Swanson sees Cult of Glory as being “very timely.”

Eerily so.

“The nation reels anew,” Swanson says from his home in Pittsburgh, where the 34-year veteran of The Dallas Morning News now teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh. “But it’s an old story: white police officers killing men and women of color. Some of the very worst of it happened a little over 100 years ago, along the Texas-Mexico border. There, the Texas Rangers — the vaunted official force of the Lone Star State — didn’t invent police brutality. But they perfected it. Operating as what we would now term death squads, they executed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

“Some of those killed were bandits who attacked white-owned farms and ranches. But many of the dead had committed no crimes. They were guilty only of having brown skin. Or they lived on land that white ranchers wanted to steal. The Rangers obliged by beating and shooting them.”



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