I don’t think it would be safe for any colored person to go near that school.
—NAACP LAWYER L. CLIFFORD DAVIS, MANSFIELD, TEXAS, 1956
It’s a classic cowboy pose: the Texas Ranger leaning against an oak tree, one leg cocked, with a polished western boot on display. He has pushed his Stetson back at an angle suggesting relaxation, and he has casually hooked his thumbs in his belt, but his holstered pistol stands at the ready. In a photograph of this moment, he looks calm yet vigilant.
To the Ranger’s left, the Mansfield, Texas, high school looms. Nine or ten students have gathered near the main entrance of the building. They are white. Above them, someone has suspended a figure—a dummy, made of straw. It depicts a black person hanging by a noose. Both the Ranger and the effigy serve the same purpose on this hot, sunny day. They are there as a warning.
The placid farm and ranch town of Mansfield found itself convulsed by racial matters in the late summer of 1956. Black residents, led by the NAACP and backed by federal courts, attempted to integrate its high school. White mobs formed to stop them. As threats of violence rose, the governor of Texas ordered the Rangers to Mansfield.
Similar confrontations erupted elsewhere in America about the same time. State police in a Kentucky town had to escort black students into a white school. In Tennessee, National Guardsmen kept enraged white protesters at bay while black students enrolled. Later, federal marshals did the same—at the risk of serious injury and death—at the University of Mississippi.
Unlike them, the Texas Rangers did not part a sea of angry white supremacists so black pupils could go to school. They did not shield frightened teenagers who carried their books past howling, spitting men. Nor did they confront gun-toting rioters to ensure racial justice.
The Rangers had a different mission in 1956. Their job was to keep black children out.
The civil rights struggle in Texas of the 1950s ran a course of fear, heartbreak, tragedy, and injustice. The old ways of the Old South did not die easily. The story of the Rangers in this period may best be told through two of their most esteemed lawmen, Sergeant E. J. “Jay” Banks and Captain Bob Crowder.
Banks grew up on a small West Texas cotton farm. Crowder was a tall, laconic former Marine who had spent time as a motorcycle cop. Both were white. (No black man wore a Ranger badge until 1988.)
Crowder became known for his ability to obtain confessions. His tactic: keep the suspect awake and isolated from lawyers. “Then you go to work on him—talk, talk, talk,” Crowder said. “Hell, I’ve sat up three days and nights talking [until] I’d get the best of him.” In the mid-1950s, Crowder held the rank of Ranger captain and commanded Company B out of Dallas. Banks was his sergeant. Though neither had much affection for the other, both shared a sense that, as Rangers, they had climbed a great peak. “I wouldn’t swap the job for the Presidency of the United States,” Crowder said.
Company B’s territory extended into East Texas, an insular red-dirt region of tenebrous forests, Southern temperament, and troubled race relations. It was there, near the city of Longview, that a white man named Perry Dean Ross, twenty-one, was drinking beer on October 22, 1955. He was so drunk that he was thrown out of Tatum’s Tavern, one of his regular spots. Around midnight he grabbed his .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle and told a friend, Joe Simpson, “Let’s go on a raid.” Which, as he later explained, “was the name we used for shooting at Negroes.” They had done it many times before.
With his friend, Ross drove an old Ford on dark, two-lane State Highway 149 toward the community of Mayflower, a place of sagging frame houses and tenant farmers’ shacks set deep in the pines. Soon they reached the Hughes Café, a “colored” joint just off the highway. “I told Joe Simpson to hand me the rifle,” Ross said. “He asked me what I was going to do and I said I was going to shoot the gun myself.”
Inside the small tin-roofed café, music poured from the jukebox. A sixteen-year-old black boy was drinking soda and dancing. His name was John Earl Reese, and he had returned home after three weeks of picking cotton near Dallas. Some of his earnings had bought the new clothes now folded on his bed at his grandmother’s house. He was in the tenth grade at Mayflower’s colored school. The girl with whom he danced was his thirteen-year-old cousin, Joyce Fae Nelson. “We were children,” she recalled, “doing nothing wrong.”
From his car, Ross blazed away. “I held the steering wheel with my left hand and laid the gun across the left door,” he said. “I was going 85 miles per hour at the time, and I fired nine shots in the front of the Hughes Café.” The bullets tore through the door and windows. One of them struck John Reese in the head. His cousin remembered: “John Earl Reese fell on the floor out of my arms.”
Ross and Simpson sped away and drank more beer. Ross went to work the next morning at a munitions plant, came home at five o’clock, and heard that a boy had been killed at Hughes Café. He felt no remorse, but he did have the presence of mind to tell his friend to get rid of the rifle. His friend threw it in the Sabine River.
The local sheriff, who showed little interest in pursuing a serious murder investigation, conjured a wide range of possible suspects. “It could be whites just as well as could be niggers,” he said, adding that some locals believed that a Communist might have pulled the trigger. Because of the sheriff’s reluctance and some jurisdictional questions, Rangers Crowder and Banks took over the case. They and others questioned more than three hundred people, and the Rangers succeeded in prying a detailed confession from Ross.
His subsequent indictment for murder was an anomaly in East Texas, where whites rarely faced prison time for killing blacks. The Rangers’ performance delighted the state office of the NAACP. “A feeling of security has been re-established in the hearts of many Texans,” the group’s executive secretary wrote to the Texas Department of Public Safety. “People, rich and poor, great and small, feel reassured that they can live freely and without fear.”
This cause for elation didn’t last. At trial, Ross’s father claimed that the Rangers had cut a deal to secure the confession. “They told me that . . . if [Ross] would tell everything he knew, they would do their best to help him get a suspended sentence,” the father testified. “I thought they could do right smart.” If true, the Rangers had committed a critical blunder, because a confession given after such a promise was inadmissible in court. Banks, questioned on the stand, said he did not remember making an agreement with Ross’s family. Crowder testified no arrangement had been made in his presence. The judge admitted most of the confession, but the issue of leniency now stood before the court.
In his closing argument, Ross’s lawyer had this advice for the all-white jury: “Call it a bad day and let the boy get on with his life.” The panel apparently agreed. Ross was convicted of murder but sentenced to five years in prison, suspended. He walked from the courthouse a free man.
The daily newspapers in the region gave it scant attention, and the merchants of Ranger romance ignored it. The Reese murder faded into quick obscurity. Not so the incident that marked Crowder’s career and set the tone for events to come: a bloody riot at the Rusk State Hospital.
The brick and steel hospital compound, in the dense woods of East Texas, was originally built as a prison. It had been converted by the state into an overcrowded, antiquated mental institution. In its maximum-security unit for the criminally insane, with barred cells and an electric fence, conditions ranged from primitive to punitive. Some patient-inmates slept on concrete floors. The miserly budget allowed for little in the way of therapy. Authorities controlled inmates with strong antipsychotic drugs, serial electroshock treatments, and the occasional frontal lobotomy. Numbed men spent their empty days on wooden benches lining the corridors. They would “just sit,” one investigator observed, “like cigar-store Indians.”
As was customary in Texas, the maximum-security unit had been officially, and rigidly, segregated by race. The white side may have been bleak, but the other side was worse. It was, by common description, a hellhole, a snake pit for the triple-cursed: black, felonious, and deranged. Sweltering in summer and freezing in winter, it stank of sweat and sewage, and had rancid food, few toilets, and no place for recreation. White attendants routinely addressed the inmates with racial slurs. Trustees known as floor bouncers clubbed misbehaving inmates with rubber hoses.
On April 16, 1955, some eighty inmates—described by one reporter as “crazed Negroes”—seized control of the unit. They were led by a towering, muscular inmate named Ben Riley, a paranoid schizophrenic who had, as a juvenile, killed a man in a dispute over money. The rioters overpowered two attendants and used ice picks and mop handles to attack the bouncers who had victimized them, critically injuring one. “His head was beaten to a pulp with a baseball bat,” one account said. They also took the unit’s physician and an assistant supervisor hostage. Some of the inmates—intent on direct revenge—tried to hook the physician up to the electroshock machine, but they couldn’t make it work. Riley forced the doctor to phone the hospital’s chief officer and lure him to the unit. He became a hostage as well.
Local police arrived, followed by state troopers. Though some of the hostages had been released, three remained. A standoff was now under way. Homer Garrison sent Captain Crowder from Dallas. Riley, the riot leader, had demanded to negotiate with a ranking government official, but he agreed that Crowder could act as a surrogate. Crowder was, after all, a Texas Ranger.
They spoke first by hospital phone. “I don’t want no foolishness,” Crowder said. He warned Riley that he would enter the unit with a .45 pistol on each hip. “I’m not coming in unarmed,” he said, “because you’ve already got three people over there as hostages and I don’t want to be the fourth one—and I’m not going to be. . . . I just want to tell you this. If something goes amiss, I know who’s going to fall first.”
Crowder strode into the maximum-security yard and met Riley on the steps of Ward 6. It made for an irresistible image—a singular brave lawman confronting violent lunatics who were, in the popular imagination, little better than rabid dogs. The newspapers couldn’t resist it: “Captain Crowder, a big, impressive man . . . walked through the fence gate and up to the building held by the rioters.” The notion of the lone heroic Ranger wasn’t entirely accurate, though. From fifty yards away, highway patrolman and future Ranger Jim Ray watched it all through his rifle scope, keeping Riley in his crosshairs. “I had a sniper rifle trained on this person,” Ray said decades later, “in case he tried to do anything.”
Crowder and the shirtless Riley, who was armed with an ice pick and a knife, talked for about twenty minutes. The Ranger did not threaten Riley or try to cow him. Instead, he offered reasoning and the promise of help. If the rioters surrendered, Crowder told Riley, “I’ll see that you get a hearing.” He added: “I think you will get more consideration from [state officials] if you’ll throw down your weapons and act like men.”
The word of the Ranger was enough. With “perspiration gleaming on his chocolate-colored skin,” the Associated Press reported, Riley “threw down the ice pick and a big knife from his belt.” The other inmates also laid down their weapons and freed the hostages. The riot was over.
Crowder was hailed as a hero, a paragon of cool toughness under extreme duress. He had defused a potential disaster simply by promising the inmates they would receive a fair airing of their grievances. That, however, didn’t happen. The executive director of the state hospital board hurried to Rusk, spent a few hours, and announced he found no basis for the inmates’ complaints. Few changes were ordered, other than increased security. The maximum-security units remained segregated by race. For his role in leading the riot, Riley was thrown into twenty-four-hour solitary confinement, where hospital staff gave him extra doses of the powerful antipsychotic Thorazine and additional rounds of electroshock.
Any trust Riley and the others had put in Crowder’s assurances proved to be misplaced. Crowder was not to blame, of course. He had merely served as a tool for higher authorities. He and the Rangers would play much the same role a year later, when the school integration movement bubbled up in Texas.
The landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education held that racial segregation in public schools, which had prevailed for decades under the spurious doctrine of separate but equal, violated the Constitution. In 1955 the Court ordered states to remedy this by integrating schools with all deliberate speed. Lawyers from the NAACP used Brown to bring lawsuits across the South on behalf of black schoolchildren. They filed one of them against the Mansfield, Texas, school district.
Mansfield had persevered as a nondescript prairie town of some 1,500 people, about 350 of them black. Age-old rules of race separation prevailed. A 1956 editorial in the Mansfield News explained the dominant white attitude of the day: “We are not against the Negro, but we are against social equality.” White-owned farms grew cotton, and black sharecroppers worked the fields. At downtown cafés, blacks were required to enter at the rear and dine in separate rooms. Elementary students who were not white attended the Mansfield Colored School, which until 1954 did not have electricity or running water. As for secondary students, Mansfield did not even rise to the level of separate but equal. The town had built no high school for black students. They were bused twenty miles to a segregated high school in Fort Worth.
The Mansfield school case came at a time of great racial upheaval and transformation across the Deep South. In August 1955, white men in Money, Mississippi, tortured and murdered black teenager Emmett Till because they believed he flirted with a white woman. His mother insisted that the fourteen-year-old’s mutilated body be displayed at an open-casket funeral to show the world the horror of his death. In December 1955, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white man. The resulting bus boycott marked the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a national figure.
In Texas, business and political leaders, including Governor Allan Shivers, voiced strong public opposition to the Brown decision. Many of them promoted the canard that blacks’ struggle for civil rights was part of a Communist plot to weaken America. Shivers, a conservative Democrat, had established a relatively progressive record as governor, pushing for improved aid for the elderly and higher teacher salaries. He drew the line, however, at integration. A lawyer and decorated World War II army officer, Shivers did not embody the strutting, race-baiting demagogue of Dixie statehouse caricature. But he vowed that integration of Texas schools would never occur while he held office. Separation of blacks and whites, at least in the classroom, had been brought forth by divine genesis, he declared. “No court can hand down an edict,” Shivers said, and “no group can pass a law to change what God has made.”
The governor was mistaken, at least as it regarded the courts. A federal judge in Dallas initially dismissed as “premature” an NAACP suit seeking admission of three black students to Mansfield High School. But in August 1956 the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the students had the right to enroll. This was the first time a federal court had ordered a Texas school to desegregate.
It soon became clear the locals would resist. About four hundred men, most of them angry and all of them white, assembled outside Mansfield High School. They vowed to block the passage of any black student who tried to enter, and they carried hand-painted signs that said THIS IS A WHITE SCHOOL and DEAD COONS ARE THE BEST COONS.
When an assistant district attorney waded into the swarm of protesters and advised them against causing trouble, he was cursed and pushed to the ground. “Anyone with a silk shirt and fancy pants who comes down here and tells a man in overalls what to do,” a man in overalls explained, “he is looking for trouble.” Some in the crowd threatened reporters and smashed photographers’ cameras. White vigilantes stopped and searched cars coming into town. One participant was asked if he was leading the segregationists. “There ain’t nobody leading this,” he said. “This is just a mob.”
The first effigy was raised on Mansfield’s Main Street. Hanging from a strand of barbed wire, its face was painted black and its clothes were splattered with red paint. A hand-lettered sign on one leg said THIS WOULD BE A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE. A placard on the other leg said THIS NEGRO TRIED TO ENTER A WHITE SCHOOL. Two more effigies went up at the school itself. One hung by its neck above the main entrance, while the other swung from the flagpole. The school principal, a man named Willie Pigg, refused to cut them down because he didn’t put them up. “They might stay up there until Christmas,” he said.
As was their intent, such actions alarmed L. Clifford Davis, the Fort Worth lawyer for the NAACP. Davis warned in a telegram to Governor Shivers that “violence is almost certain to occur when these students attempt to enroll on Friday.” He asked the governor to send more law enforcement to Mansfield “to assure that law and order will be maintained.” Davis added, “These Negro students are exercising a constitutional right and the full strength of law enforcement agencies of the state should protect them.”
The governor wasted no time. He responded to the request that same day with an order of protection—but not for the NAACP or the black students. Shivers was looking out for the white folks.
At about the same time, a mob formed in the coal-mining town of Sturgis, Kentucky, to keep blacks from integrating schools there. But Governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler believed the black students had a right to attend. “If anybody shows up to go to school,” Chandler said, “we are not going to let anybody keep them from doing it.” Chandler deployed the National Guard—with tanks—and the Kentucky State Police to enforce his order.
In Texas the governor didn’t need the National Guard, and he didn’t need tanks. He had the Rangers. Shivers ordered them to Mansfield. From Dallas, Captain Crowder dispatched Sergeant Banks and several others.
Banks was brawny and good-looking and did not mind displaying these qualities for the cameras. “He was always on the cover of a magazine or newspaper,” one Ranger recalled without fondness. In early 1956, he was selected for the first-flight entourage when Braniff Airways inaugurated nonstop service from Dallas to Newark. “I was part of all these festivities because I was a ‘famous Texas Ranger,’” he wrote, “with the Rangers being the real symbol of Texas at the time.” When they arrived in New Jersey, Banks walked off the plane right behind Miss Texas. He made the celebrity rounds in New York, including an appearance on NBC’s Today show with his Stetson on his head and his pistol on his hip. “It seemed natural,” he said, “that a big event like this would need the famous Ranger in order to make for more jubilation.”
Jubilation was in short supply and Miss Texas nowhere in sight when the famous Ranger arrived in Mansfield on August 30, 1956. Banks wrote in his official report that he faced a “large crowd of angry white people gathered at school declaring their intention of resisting, by force if necessary, any effort by Negroes to register.”
Those angry white people, however, didn’t constitute his major concern, because Banks, with his rural upbringing, believed he understood them. “The people gathered did not have the appearance of rough types,” he recalled. “They were just salt-of-the-earth citizens who had been stirred up by agitators. They were concerned because they were convinced that someone was trying to interfere with their way of life.”
Second, and more important, the governor of Texas—unlike his counterpart in Kentucky—didn’t want the Rangers interfering with these protesters. “It is not my intention,” Shivers said, “to permit the use of state officers or troops to shoot down or intimidate Texas citizens who are making orderly protest against a situation instigated and agitated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.”
The Rangers in Mansfield were therefore forbidden from escorting any black students past the mob and into class. The governor directed that any blacks who tried to enroll at Mansfield High School would be immediately transferred out of the district. And he ordered the Rangers to arrest any of them who attempted to enter the school.
With those instructions, Banks—wearing Rangers khaki and a black necktie—took up position outside the high school. The crowd of protesters milled nearby. Much more dangerous than the mob, to Banks, was a man distributing pro-integration flyers. This “inflammatory literature,” in the Ranger’s judgment, merited quick action. “I seized the literature and escorted him out of the area,” Banks said. “He was somewhat reluctant until assisted by the toe of a Ranger’s boot.”
Banks also expelled—though without having to kick him—an Episcopal priest. In full clerical garb, the Reverend D. W. Clark arrived from Fort Worth and delivered a sidewalk sermon to the mob, with a call for peace and understanding that included a plea to love one’s neighbor. “Negroes aren’t our neighbors,” a man in the crowd responded. More Bible talk from Clark only fueled the protesters’ outrage. “The swarm of angry faces grew tighter around the slight clergyman,” one reporter wrote. “Shouts became louder. Fists were shaken.”
As Banks saw it, Clark was “inciting the anger of the crowd when he attempted to preach to them, criticizing their actions.” He did not arrest—or even warn—anyone who had threatened the priest. Instead, the Ranger took Clark by the arm and led him away. “I suggested he go home and leave the disturbance for the experts to handle.”
At one point Captain Crowder also came to Mansfield and met with the school superintendent. “The tall Ranger captain went about his work quietly,” a local newspaper reported with reverence. “He let it be known that the Rangers were there to prevent violence and protect human lives and property. . . . That done, he planted a booted foot on a post and methodically began to whittle.” Crowder stayed only long enough for photographers to capture him in the pose that had become his trademark. “When he puts his booted foot up on a stump and starts to whittle,” an admiring writer observed, “law and order has arrived.”
Another photo drew even more attention. Newspapers across the country published the shot of Banks leaning against the tree with the effigy hanging from the high school. The caption, as written by United Press, reported that Banks was “on guard” and keeping “a watchful eye.” Neither he nor Crowder made any attempt to remove the effigy.
For the most part, this was easy duty for the Rangers. That was because, as Banks observed in his official report, “no Negro students showed up” to enroll. As a result of their actions, Banks recalled, the Rangers “seemed to have gained the respect and support of the local white citizens.” And the black citizens “felt intimidated by the show of force.”
It was, in truth, the lack of force by the Rangers that intimidated black residents. They believed that Banks and the other Rangers would not protect them. Left undefended—President Dwight Eisenhower had declined to provide any federal assistance—the black students stayed away. After several days, the NAACP announced it was suspending its efforts, at least temporarily, in Mansfield. “We could not take them in there while that mob is standing there ready to do violence,” said Davis, the NAACP lawyer.
From a black perspective Mansfield had been an ugly defeat. It would be even worse in a few days, when the scene shifted to another Texas town. There, as an NAACP lawyer complained, the governor used Banks and other Rangers explicitly “to protect the will of the mob.”
One of the last recorded lynchings in Texas occurred in Texarkana, a city in the far northeastern corner of the state. In 1942 a black man accused of assaulting a white woman was pulled by a group of men from his hospital bed, where he was being treated for a gunshot wound. They dragged him behind a speeding car to the edge of town and hanged him from a cotton gin winch.
Fourteen years later, in September 1956, racial strife burst forth once more in Texarkana. No black men were accused this time of assaulting white women. Instead, two black students committed the offense of seeking to attend the whites-only Texarkana Junior College, a publicly funded institution.
When the news of this spread, a cross was burned outside the entrance to the college. Shots were fired at a black church while a choir practiced, and shotgun pellets shattered the window of a gas station owned by a black advocate of integrated schools. The president of the college did little to calm the situation. In a public speech on integration he told his white listeners, “It is not only your right but your duty to resist it.” Angry white men gathered in front of the Texarkana campus, and a lawyer for the NAACP once more asked the governor of Texas for help. Without it, the lawyer said in a telegram, “a state of anarchy will exist as to the Negro students and they will be at the mercy of a maddened mob.”
Governor Shivers again ordered the Rangers to the scene, and Captain Crowder sent Banks with several others. Upon his arrival in Texarkana, Banks surveyed the protesters and determined “there was plenty of evidence that a large segment of the crowd had plans to keep the black students from registering.” Some chalk marks outside the college provided a clue. A line had been drawn on the sidewalk, and next to it was scrawled this caution: “The nigger who crosses this line will die.”
Like their counterparts in many Southern cities, some of Texarkana’s more influential residents had formed a White Citizens Council. Such groups shared the basic goal of the Ku Klux Klan—opposing integration—but citizens councils wished to separate themselves from the dirt farmers and rubes of the KKK. These were businessmen and powerful civic figures who did not wear hoods or conduct secret meetings at night with crosses aflame. They operated more like civil-rights-quashing Rotarians. They gained the informal title of the “uptown Klan.”
Banks learned that some in the crowd outside the college were citizens council members. He arranged for a meeting with their president, J. F. Williamson. “I told him exactly what his group could do without crossing us,” Banks said. “We got along fine. We were soon good friends.”
On the morning of Monday, September 10, 1956, two black students arrived outside the college in a Red Top cab. One was Jessalyn Gray, eighteen, who had already passed an admissions exam. She had pinned her hair back neatly and wore a long floral-print skirt. The other was Steve Posten, seventeen, who had taken the exam and was now returning to see if he passed. He wore thick-framed glasses and carried a briefcase.
“We were expecting to start school,” Gray said. They were both aware that no black students had been allowed to attend the college. “We didn’t see any reason why things couldn’t change,” she said.
The mob had gathered at the side of the road, some in overalls and some in business suits. “They were yelling and screaming,” Gray recalled more than sixty years later. “That can be pretty scary.” Banks and several other Rangers had come too. “There were signs all through the crowd that read, ‘No NAACP Coons,’ . . . ‘No NAACP Communism,’ and similar slogans,” Banks said. A noose had been tied to the limb of a tree.
Two newsmen tried to question the students, but Banks intervened. “They were obviously out of town reporters trying to start trouble,” he said. “We told them if they wanted to stay in the area they would have to mind their own business, otherwise they would be removed or arrested.” Another reporter and photographer approached. “I immediately took hold of them and informed them they were aiming for trouble,” Banks said. “I instructed the two of them to leave the area or face arrest.”
While Banks was threatening journalists with jail, the two students walked toward the school, holding hands, but they didn’t get far. The mob blocked them. They tried to go around, and the crowd moved with them. Protesters with jutting jaws stood only inches from the students. One man shouted, “Go home, nigger!” They surrounded Posten; some kicked him. Others threw gravel. The Rangers watched it happen and did nothing.
Banks later offered a bloodless description. “The two black students found that they couldn’t get around the human barrier formed by the crowd,” he said. “So they retraced their steps, got back in the taxi and left.”
The crowd cheered. After about forty-five minutes, Jessalyn Gray returned by cab, determined once more to enroll. Again the jeering mob blocked her way. But she saw one person among them she thought might help her, a man who represented her government: a Ranger. She approached Banks, who stood grim-faced at the forefront of the hundreds who opposed her. Behind him, a man raised a sign that said NIGGERS STAY OUT!!!
Jessalyn Gray pleaded with Banks for protection. He refused.
“We were under no obligation to escort any person in or out of the school,” he explained afterward. Not only did Banks—the ranking law enforcement officer on the scene—decline to assist the young woman, he threatened to arrest her if she tried to enroll. “The Rangers were there to keep order,” Banks recalled. “If it could be preserved only by not permitting the student entry, that was their job.”
Despite Banks’s efforts to restrain journalists, Life magazine photographer Joe Scherschel was able to work close to the crowd. “I’ve never seen a meaner mob in my life than the one that surrounded” the two students, he recalled. “These kids were literally run off by the mob. . . . There were at least three Texas Rangers in the crowd, and not one of them lifted a finger.”
Jessalyn Gray returned to the taxi and did not try again to enter Texarkana Junior College. She enrolled instead at North Texas State College in Denton.
With a significant assist from the Rangers, the Texarkana mob had won. It was a great victory for the White Citizens Council as well. Council president Williamson sent a telegram to Governor Shivers praising the way Banks and his men “controlled the situation . . . where the Communist NAACP has attempted to force Negroes into a white school over opposition of the community.”
Banks and the other Rangers departed Texarkana in the warm glow of segregationists’ appreciation. But before they left, the citizens council “gave us a big chicken dinner,” Banks said, “and we all parted friends.” The Rangers’ high command apparently was pleased too. Sergeant Banks was soon promoted to captain.
Many in Texas, including some of the most powerful state officials, believed the best solution to the school integration question would be to destroy the NAACP. State Representative Joe Pool of Dallas—described by one writer as someone “who forever looks like an angry toad in search of a subversive fly”—pledged to introduce legislation to ban the NAACP from Texas and “protect our public institutions from its insidious influence.” While he was at it, Pool promised, he would strengthen state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. The governor himself said “agitators”—meaning NAACP lawyers—“ought to be put in jail.”
The Rangers, who had in previous years operated secret anti-NAACP campaigns, started a new one. In late September 1956, Thurgood Marshall—the group’s chief counsel and future Supreme Court justice—complained to the U.S. Justice Department that Rangers in Dallas had harassed and intimidated his clients. Marshall said unnamed Rangers went to the homes and workplaces of people who had sued the Dallas school district over segregation. The Rangers threatened some with jail, Marshall said, while others were told they would lose their jobs if they persisted in bringing legal action. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover ordered an investigation, but only after informing Garrison, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, that G-men would be sniffing around his agency. The FBI’s Dallas office determined that the Rangers had indeed warned litigants of job loss or imprisonment, but agents found no civil rights violations.
Marshall and the NAACP soon faced much bigger problems than any such attempts at individual suppression. Texas attorney general John Ben Shepperd charged that the group had violated state law by inciting black citizens, including those in Mansfield, to file suit against school districts. Defending the NAACP, Marshall argued that the group had done nothing illegal and had merely pursued its clients’ rights as determined by the U.S. Supreme Court. “We have done nothing worse,” he said, “than getting Texas people to obey the law of the land.”
Like the Rangers of the early twentieth century, the attorney general’s staff crisscrossed the state to investigate the NAACP, raiding the group’s offices and seizing its records. To travel to eight cities in three days, an assistant attorney general leading the investigation flew on a state airplane piloted by a Ranger. Shepperd presented the findings to a state district court judge in the East Texas city of Tyler. The judge declared, “I ain’t got nothing against the nigger people,” but granted Shepperd’s motion for a permanent injunction against the NAACP. This in essence shut it down in Texas for years, until a federal court ruled the order unconstitutional. The attorney general’s success wasn’t quite enough for the Texas Legislature, which in 1957 passed segregation laws aimed at blocking the Supreme Court’s Brown decision.
The resistance to integration would take generations to wither and would never truly die, but the coming decade brought some reckoning and recompense. Texarkana Junior College admitted its first black students in 1963. And in 1965 the Mansfield school district, facing the loss of federal funding, quietly integrated its high school. Willie Pigg, who had risen from principal to district superintendent, gave the new black students a tour of the campus from which they had been banned only nine years before. “Times have changed,” he said.
Few Americans—save the dwellers of the darkest ideological corners—now openly honor those in various public positions who tolerated or promoted racial injustice. They are generally viewed as, at best, benighted products of their time and place. As for the Rangers, a charitable modern assessment of their actions would perhaps find them captives of circumstance. Crowder and Banks were not to blame, despite possible investigative missteps, if white jurors spared the white killer of a black child. At Mansfield and Texarkana, their manner and tactics might be questioned, but they could not be faulted for following the governor’s orders. The most ardent of their admirers might treat this period with a discreetly averted gaze. That, however, would not be the Ranger way.
Cantankerous essayist J. Frank Dobie was one of the few Texans who directly criticized the use of the Rangers at Mansfield. “This was probably the first time in the history of the state,” Dobie wrote, “that the chief executive dispatched armed forces not to quell a mob but uphold it.” Some years later, Garland Smith, a member of the Texas Civil Rights Advisory Committee, wrote that the Rangers’ behavior “told every bigot in Texas . . . , ‘If you will only assemble a mob, or threaten to do so, the power of the Texas Rangers will be on your side to deny civil rights to school children.’”
Such views did not carry the day. As so often happened, the Ranger-friendly propaganda machinery fabricated a new and more glorious truth: it wasn’t the black children facing mobs who showed courage in Texas of 1956. It was the Rangers. Only a few weeks after Mansfield and Texarkana, a Dallas newspaper insisted that violence had been averted in both places “thanks in good measure to the Rangers’ presence.” An Associated Press story said their actions at Mansfield “represented all the respect—and almost reverence—that Texans hold for one of the most distinctive law enforcement agencies in the world.” One year later, the Associated Press was reporting that Banks’s “latest exploits” included “helping break up anti-integration crowds at Mansfield and Texarkana.”
Mainstream newspapers of the day—owned, written, and edited by white men—were naturally inclined to applaud such larger-than-life characters, even if they had to create them. These refurbished Rangers were not complicit with white supremacists; they had instead been transformed into champions of justice. In 1960, a Dallas Morning News editorial marked Banks’s “dashing career” with this hallucinatory recounting of the Mansfield protest: “The big Ranger—six-shooters strapped to his side—walked up to the mob. In a mild drawl, Banks ordered: ‘Now you all go back to your homes.’ The mob quietly disbanded.” Less than two weeks later, Newsweek used nearly identical language in praise of Banks, which the magazine called a “steel-nerved . . . personification of the Ranger legend.”
Banks served as the live model for the famed Texas Ranger statue bearing the legend ONE RIOT - ONE RANGER that was unveiled at Dallas’s Love Field in 1961. When he retired from law enforcement in 1982, he received a letter from Shivers. The governor who had ordered the Rangers to block integration wrote that Banks deserved the respect of “all Texans who believe in law enforcement with dignity and recognition of all human rights.”
The Texas Ranger Dispatch, the official purveyor of Ranger lore, continued the song of praise for Banks. In 2004 it said this of Mansfield: “Sergeant Banks and his fellow Rangers kept things quiet and peaceful. . . . With their evenhanded display of impartiality, Jay and the Rangers gained not only the respect of the locals, but also the public gratitude of state and federal authorities.” The Dispatch said nothing of the effect on black citizens and failed to discuss Texarkana.
Crowder also enjoyed a soaring reputation, much of it based on his handling of the Rusk State Hospital takeover. A year after the episode, dozens of newspapers printed an Associated Press account insisting that Crowder had “walked unarmed into the midst of a violent riot.” Subsequent stories echoed the notion of Crowder’s fearless victory. The “surly and belligerent rioters,” a newspaper recalled years afterward, “threw down their arms . . . when the rawhide-tough Ranger faced them.” An editorial in the Paris, Texas, newspaper also recalled the tale of Crowder and the rioters “who meekly laid down their arms” at his command. “That’s the Rangers,” the Paris News proclaimed, “bigger and better than the script writers would dare make them.”
Crowder went on to be named to the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame. His had been a stellar career, it was noted, but his greatest achievement had come at Rusk. Not only had he single-handedly disarmed the rioters, Crowder’s Hall of Fame plaque declared, but he had done it by assuring them that “their grievances would get a fair hearing.”
The plaque didn’t mention that a fair hearing never took place. Nor did it add the obvious conclusion: like so many others, the Rusk inmates fell for the Ranger myth.