2020 was a year in which destructive rioting for the sake of racial revenge and personal profit was all but explicitly sanctioned by the Federal Government. Among the casualties were the Icons of America’s accomplished and explicitly White past. One of the chief amongst these, in my humble opinion, was a statue known mostly in its own slice of Texas, a bronze work that was donated to the Dallas Love field Airport in 1961. The statue is named after a famous anecdote of the exploits of Ranger Captain Bill McDonald of Company B and using Ranger Captain Jay Banks as the model. The “One Riot, One Ranger” Statue wasn’t taken down by any enemy’s axes, saws, or picks as part of some event of fire and brimstone. It was quietly removed on June 4th, of 2020, following the publication of a compilation of historical racial grievances levied against the Rangers. What was so offensive about this mound of metal? The model for the statue, Captain Jay Banks, was posthumously convicted for the high crime of not being on the ever shifting “right side of history.”
In the year 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas saw it’s White children held at bayonet point, forced by the National Guard to integrate with a hostile tribe under orders of the sitting President Eisenhower through the invocation of the Insurrection Act. The results of this single decision ought to be marked as the real end of the “American Experiment”. What most Americans don’t realize however, is that this event was merely an echo: a retaliation for an incident that had taken place a year before.
1956, Texarkana, Texas. The White majority of Texarkana Junior College decided to exercise their right and desire to freely and exclusively associate with their own tribe in defiance of the Federal Government’s overreach. A group of over 300 White students had gathered to the entrance of the School to prevent Black agitators from forcing themselves onto the student body. Governor Allan Shivers, sympathetic to the segregationist cause; deployed a Ranger Division lead by Captain Jay Banks to ensure the safety of students and prevent a riot. The Rangers acted with the utmost professionalism and refused to intervene on anyone’s behalf unless violence occurred. This was enough to have his personage retroactively condemned and the name of the Rangers called into jeopardy.
Some may say it was just a lump of bronze, but these Icons are the only link to the past that many of us have in our atomized age. If nothing else, our Icons and the stories attached to them are our only window into the kind of world we want to live in. The people we want to model ourselves on.
The men these statues are depicting have long since departed to their heavenly reward, but for those of us who remain, the ghosts still stand and their examples still guide. This is their power and why the System will always find an excuse to remove them.
