Professor Benjamin Johnson

There's no real physical evidence.

The local authorities don't have enough evidence to charge him, so they call in the Texas Rangers.

And the way the Rangers handle this case is that they take Bob White out of the county jail every night for a week, chain him to a tree, and beat him senseless.

And after five or six days of this treatment, sure enough, White unsurprisingly confesses.

This goes to court.

He's convicted and sentenced to death, but he appeals and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, so the nation's foremost civil rights organization, takes up his cause and says, you can't use this evidence in court because it was tortured from him.

It was coerced and the Supreme Court ends up throwing out the evidence.

You know, White is assassinated in open court by his former employer, so it doesn't do him any good.

But it just shows you that even though they've become a conventional police force, not unlike other state police forces, their actions are still deeply controversial.

Well, the Texas State Police has its origins in the Reconstruction-era government.

So this is a government of Black voters in Texas, white unionists, and white unionists from the North who had been sent down.

So that police force is really hated by many white Texans.

And when

when Reconstruction is overthrown and the White South as a whole is left to run its own affairs with disastrous results for the Black population, for the freed people and their descendants, the Texas police, that Texas police force goes away.

And I forget when the DPS was refounded, but

Yeah, they're a branch of state government and of the state police.

They're like cousins to the highway patrol and the people who stop you if you speak.

What's often forgotten about Hamer, if I can interject, and downplayed by the Texas Ranger Museum and Hall of Fame, is that in the 19-teens, he was involved in these killings along the U.S.-Mexican border.

And the one state representative, Representative J.T.

Canales from South Texas, Mexican-American guy, the only non-white guy in the Texas legislature at that point, he's the one who files the charges against the Rangers after the Port Veneer Massacre.