Op-ed writer says Texas Rangers baseball team should toss 'racist' name into 'garbage dump of history'

As leftists around the country destroy statue after statue, and companies do away with socially unacceptable symbols and images in a stunning flurry of wokeness, a Chicago Tribune editorial board member has declared that the Texas Rangers of Major League Baseball should toss their "racist" moniker into the "garbage dump of history."

What are the details?

Steve Chapman, in his "MLB's Texas Rangers should give up their name, which honors police force with brutal, racist history" op-ed, wrote that while the Texas Rangers of history have been "widely revered" in his native state, a recent treatise says they shouldn't be.

Chapman said journalist Doug J. Swanson's "Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers" exposes their "long record of savagery, lawlessness, and racism."

More from the op-ed:

"They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents," he writes. "They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexicans and Mexican Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the South."

A century ago, during the fighting that took place along the border during the Mexican Revolution, blood flowed like the Rio Grande. "The terms 'death squads' and 'ethnic cleansing' would not enter common usage for another 60 years or so," Swanson notes, "but that was what the Rangers were and what they did."

Later, they were a bulwark acting to hold back racial equality. When black students tried to enroll in the segregated Texarkana Junior College in 1956, angry white people barred the way, hurling gravel and racial slurs and forcing the students to leave. The Rangers stood idly by.

The message to racists, said a member of the Texas Civil Rights Advisory Committee, was plain: "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."

Chapman added that Swanson's book led to the removal of a Texas Rangers statue from a lobby at the Love Field airport in Dallas earlier this month.

Now it's the baseball team's turn

"That decision is a good start in coming to grips with the Rangers' poisonous past," Chapman added in his piece. "But the baseball club still carries the name of an agency that struck terror in many nonwhites."

Therefore, he said, the moniker "deserves to be relegated to the garbage dump of history. It's an undeserved tribute that reflects a widespread ignorance, at best, of the Rangers' malignant past."

Chapman offered the following observation:

"It may be argued that the team name honors the current agency, not the worst elements of its history. But without the history and the legends, the franchise would not have adopted the name. No one would name a major league team 'The Police' or 'The Highway Patrol.'"

"The Rangers name is an affront to Hispanics, African Americans and anyone who favors racial equity," he concluded. "It should be an intolerable embarrassment to the owners and fans."