The height of Texas Ranger violence against Mexicans to have occurred from 1915 to 1919. Some 300 ethnic Mexicans were murdered between 1915 and 1916 alone

By the turn of the twentieth century, the Rangers had moved on to lynching Black and Latino Texans. The Rangers weren’t remotely shy about their methods, which included torture, and bragged about their murderous prowess. Their methods led some scholars to compare them to the Gestapo in terms of their deadly efficiency and body count.

One Ranger justified his murders by saying that:

“A great many of the people who live on this side of the river are of a different race than our own. . . . it is unfortunately true that a sympathy exists [for breaking the law] because they are of the same race . . . .”

The Rangers spent much of the first half of the twentieth century attacking members of the NAACP, and after the Brown decision made part of its mandate the expulsion of the NAACP from Texas. During this period, a majority of Rangers were members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The Texas Rangers were based

“In 1838, a band of Rangers cornered an armed group of Black men who had escaped from slavery. The Rangers captured one of the men, and, after slashing him several times with a Bowie Knife, sold him back into slavery for $800, splitting the profit among themselves. In 1855, Rangers crossed the Rio Grande seeking Black fugitives who had escaped to a Mexican border town, where slavery was illegal. The Rangers burned the town to the ground for harboring freedom seekers.”

In 1877, Rangers started a shootout with Black U.S. soldiers in a West Texas saloon for allegedly violating the social order of segregation by flirting with Latinas. During the most violent years of Jim Crow, from 1880 to 1930, Texas saw hundreds of recorded lynchings. The Rangers rarely stepped in to protect Black Texans from White lynch mobs, tacitly or explicitly consenting to the extrajudicial murders.

“The Texas Rangers also violently opposed the civil rights movement and reform efforts. In 1956, when local Black residents and the NAACP tried to integrate North Texas’s Mansfield High School, the Rangers stepped in at the governor’s behest and forcibly stopped Black students from enrolling. In 1963, when voters in Chrystal City elected a Latino mayor, Juan Cornejo, who spoke out against police violence, a Texas Ranger captain smashed the newly elected mayor’s head into a wall as retaliation for such remarks. Four years later, the Rangers brutally crushed farmworker strikes across South Texas, beating Latino strikers and arresting activists who attempted to expose the Rangers’ crimes.”

Terry's Texas Rangers cavalry monument, a regiment of Texas volunteers for the Confederate States Army assembled by Colonel Benjamin Franklin Terry in August 1861, is silhouetted against the Texas State Capitol in Austin, Texas

In 1917, then-wartime adversary Germany was revealed to have been seeking an alliance with Mexico. 
Historians believe that between 700 and 5,000 Tejanos and Mexican Americans were killed by U.S. law enforcement in this period, many of them innocent. The deaths were justified as the lawful killing of Mexican “bandits.” 

According to recent historical research, as many as 5,000 Hispanic Americans were killed here in the 1910s; many died at the hands of Rangers themselves. 

In September 1915, Jesus Bazán and Antonio Longoria – both prominent leaders of the Tejano community in Hidalgo County – were fatally shot in the back by Texas Rangers after reporting a horse robbery.

In January 1918, a company of Rangers surrounded the residents of the town of Porvenir in the early morning, separated 15 men and boys from the town and executed them. 

White students enter Mansfield High School in Mansfield, Texas, as a crowd of anti-integrationists kept watch for any black students that might want to register, Sept. 4, 1956. At left wearing hat is Texas Ranger Capt. Bob Crowder.

Texas Rangers roping dead Mexicans