Should the Texas Rangers Baseball Team Change Their Name Due to Racist Past?

A newspaper columnist has brought up his reasoning for the Texas Rangers to change their name.

I want to get this out there right from the beginning. I think this is crazy. I never thought the Texas Rangers name is racist. If you want to talk about the Washington Redskins, you definitely have a valid argument. The Texas Rangers, no way. I think this dude was trying to get people to check out his newspaper, but let's hear his argument.

Steve Chapman's article in the Chicago Tribune yesterday talks about the history of the actual Texas Rangers and not the baseball team. He mainly uses references from a book titled “Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers”. An excerpt from the book was used in his article. Which you can read below.

“They burned peasant villages and slaughtered innocents,” author Doug Swanson writes. “They committed war crimes. Their murders of Mexicans and Mexican Americans made them as feared on the border as the Ku Klux Klan in the South. A century ago, during the fighting that took place along the border during the Mexican Revolution, blood flowed like the Rio Grande. “The terms ‘death squads’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ would not enter common usage for another sixty years or so,” Swanson notes, “but that was what the Rangers were and what they did.”

Today I learned that the Texas Rangers name has been controversial since the team moved to Texas in 1972. Domingo Garcia, a former Dallas City Council member who is national president of the League of United Latin American Citizens was trying to denounce the name of the team back then. “We’ve been the victims of Texas Ranger violence since the 1800s,” Garcia said in a recent interview.

We have seen companies make a lot of changes in recent weeks and maybe the Texas Rangers could be next. I saw a lot of Rangers fans discussing this article yesterday and I was just curious what you thought. Let me know in the comments about the Rangers name.