Officials at Dallas Love Field airport removed a statue of a Texas Ranger from the lobby after a new book casts shadows on the allegedly racist history of the man posed for the artwork.
The statue came under scrutiny in 2017 as “the Dallas City Council expressed support for the removal of unwelcoming symbols,” Dallas Love Field officials wrote in a Facebook post. “In light of a recently published excerpt from a forthcoming book and image of the model for the Texas Ranger sculpture that shows flippancy toward racial insensitivity, Dallas Love Field and the Office of Arts and Culture have removed the statue of the Texas Ranger from its current location and placed it in storage until a broader community dialogue can take place.”
D Magazine published an excerpt from a forthcoming book titled, “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers.” The article headlined, “The Horrible Truth of Love Field’s Texas Ranger Statue” describes the statue as a creation of sculptor Waldine Tauch from San Antonio. The airport commissioned the artist in 1959 and she chose Ranger Jay Banks as the subject.
The excerpt reports that Texas Governor Allan Shivers dispatched Rangers to Mansfield because of a group of black students, under the supervision of the NAACP and with the assistance of a court order, attempted to integrate the local high school. Their assignment, the book states, was not to escort the children into classes, but rather block their entry.
A photo from the time shows Ranger Sergeant Jay Banks leaning against a tree in front of the school while a likeness of a black student is hanged in effigy from the top of the school’s entry portal.
Shivers again sent Banks and other Rangers to Texarkana Junior College where an 18-year-old woman and a 17-year-old boy attempted to enter, the book reports. An angry mob blocked the prospective students’ path and the Rangers did nothing to help and threatened to arrest the pair, the book continues.
After the publication of the excerpts, Dallas Love Field officials made the decision to remove the statue.
“The apparent insensitivity of one individual is not an indictment of the Texas Rangers as a whole, however, given the issues we face as a City and a nation, the presence of this sculpture in a prominent location at the airport needs to be evaluated,” the officials wrote. “The sculpture was a donation to the city in 1963 when policies requiring the extensive review of public art donations were not in place.”
Dallas Morning News photojournalist intern Juan Figueroa tweeted a time-lapse video of the statue’s removal.
Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior news contributor for the Breitbart Texas-Border team. He is an original member of the Breitbart Texas team. Price is a regular panelist on Fox 26 Houston’s What’s Your Point? Sunday-morning talk show. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook.