Professor Benjamin Johnson

And Frank Hamer stalks him through the streets of Austin, sitting state representative, shows up, flashes his gun at him, confronts him down in South Texas, tells him if he keeps running his mouth off, he's going to run into real trouble.

So Hamer has a reputation long before he is responsible for killing Bonnie and Clyde.

Sure.

I think the punchline of the story is that

These critical accounts of the Rangers have been around, you know, as long as the Rangers have been around.

And it's just that now they circulate in public more, or to put it more, the Texas Rangers and their hagiographers and defenders have really lost the public monopoly on how their story is told.

You can see this as early actually as 1972 when a professional baseball team moves to

to Dallas and renames itself the Texas Rangers, they get picketed by Mexican-American civil rights activists who think of the Rangers as the ones who spied on them and brutalized them and tried to stop them.

There's a historical marker that I was involved in that this organization I'm with, Refusing to Forget, was involved in putting up to the memory of the Poor Veneer Massacre.

So there's just more public recognition of these things

And there was a statue called One Riot, One Ranger.

The Texas Ranger who modeled for that statue played a key role in preventing the integration of Mansfield High School by four black students in 1956.

That was put up in Love Field, Dallas's old small airport, the one that Southwest Airlines flies in and out of.

And it stood there from 1961 to 2020.

I would see it every time I would fly up there to go visit my grandmothers as a child.

And that was taken down in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

And a lot of scrutiny was directed at historical monuments.

And the authorities decided after this journalist, Doug Swanson, published a book called Cult of Glory that recounted the story of what the model for the statue had been involved with.

They

They just decided they didn't want any part of this.