Emma Ruby
Audio By Carbonatix
Scholar and author, Michael Phillips, SMU Professor Rick Halperin and Hadi Jawad, co-founder and president of Human Rights Dallas submitted the op-ed below on Collin County’s long history of racism and extremism.
From the Black-white tensions surrounding the Karmelo Anthony murder trial in McKinney, to an ugly anti-Muslim and anti-Indian rally in Frisco, to the explicitly racist Frisco mayoral campaign of Rod Vilhauer, who has compared immigrants to rats, Collin County is paying a price for not heeding lessons from its violent, white supremacist past.
Anthony’s murder trial began June 1 in McKinney, the seat of Collin County. Prosecutors say that Anthony, then 17, fatally stabbed another 17-year-old, Austin Metcalf, at an April 2, 2025, Frisco track meet. Anthony says that he acted in self-defense. Because Anthony is Black and Metcalf is white, the tragedy quickly transformed into a cause célèbre for the racist far right. Closing arguments in the Anthony murder trial are set to begin on Tuesday morning after the defense rested on Monday afternoon.
After Anthony was released from jail on bond, Jake Lang (a January 6 insurrectionist pardoned by President Donald Trump) formed a group he called “Protect White Americans.” He traveled halfway across the country to hold a rally 17 days after Metcalf’s death at David Kuykendall Stadium in Frisco. Metcalf’s father, Jeff, begged him by phone to stop the protest. Jeff Metcalf condemned Lang for creating “more race divide than bridging the gap.” Nevertheless, Lang persisted.
He exploited Austin Metcalf’s death as a symbol of how “white America” supposedly faced danger from a “violent Black culture” he said was animated by Black hatred of white people. Around the time of that demonstration, Lang broke into the stadium where Metcalf died. He filmed himself near what he claimed was the teen’s dried blood, although he was standing in a different location from where the homicide took place.
Since then, Lang has become a one-man racist road show. Since November, he has attempted to burn a Quran at an anti-Muslim rally in Dearborn, Michigan, and stuffed a Quran in a dead pig’s mouth at another Islamophobic gathering in Plano. During a May 19 City Council meeting in Frisco, he called for burning down mosques and Hindu temples and raged about the dark-skinned children of immigrants replacing “heritage Americans.”
Frisco police arrested Lang on June 2 for his stadium break-in. Lang had returned to Collin County as one of 50 counterdemonstrators who aimed to intimidate and disrupt a “Rally Against Rednecks” held at Frisco City Hall. Carrollton resident and political aspirant Zul Mohammed organized the event to be “an evening dedicated to celebrating the contributions of our local Asian community,” according to The Dallas Morning News.
Mohammed’s event came in response to recent Frisco City Council meetings in which speakers denounced what they described as an “Indian takeover” of the city. At one such meeting, McKinney resident Dylan Law complained that Frisco was being invaded by “unchosen, unwanted and uninvited forces” and called for the city government to “Be America First.” Audience comments at meetings became so racist and disruptive that on June 2, the Frisco City Council suspended any public comments on non-agenda items for the foreseeable future.
At the “Rally Against Rednecks,” counterdemonstrators carried guns. They echoed the “You Will Not Replace Us” chant cried out by Neo-Nazis at the pro-Confederate monument march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the murder of anti-racism activist Heather Heyer on August 12, 2017. Another counterdemonstrator tore an Indian flag in half.
Meanwhile, Rod Vilhauer made the runoff election for mayor of Frisco in spite of labeling the entire Islamic faith, which has two billion adherents worldwide, as “a terrorist group” during a March podcast. Vilhauer declared that immigrants were entering the country “like rats” before rethinking his comments and saying “that’s not the right word.” He laughed, however, when the podcast host Kaylee Campbell responded, “I would have said cockroaches.”
Meanwhile, at the start of the Anthony trial, some protesters outside the courthouse waved Confederate flags, a symbol long associated with the racist far right. The young man’s fate will be determined by jury with no Black members.
Sadly, Vilhauer and the Frisco protesters are a feature, not a bug, in local history. Collin County has a long, undistinguished record of homegrown racial violence and terrorism that has been cast into a collective memory hole. This intentional civic amnesia has blinded the second-fastest-growing county in the country to the possible dangers that Vilhauer and his ilk represent.
In the 1850s, the decade before the Civil War, almost 7 percent of Collin County’s population endured the physical and psychological violence of enslavement. Whites threatened the lives of teachers at the first school open for African Americans after emancipation in 1865, and in 1870, the school was burned to the ground by white terrorists.
In 1880, one of the grisliest, racially motivated multiple murders in North Texas history played out in Collin County. According to the historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, a mob accused Refugio Garcia, his wife, Silvestre, and their teenage daughter Maria Ines of sorcery and burned them alive. That unfortunate family joined almost 100 Mexicans and Mexican Americans lynched in the United States (mostly in Texas) from 1880 to 1900.
In 1898, white terrorism again struck Collin County when about 30-40 African Americans who regularly toiled in the local cotton fields had gathered in Plano, waiting for a storm to end. Plano whites panicked at the sight of such a large gathering of African American men. Soon, notices were posted throughout the town, including on a bank window, that said, “Mr. Negro, don’t let the sun go down on you.”
On June 15, a masked white gang issued a warning to Black residents that they had four to ten days to leave. Hearing a knock on the door of a cabin across the street and fearing his family was in danger, one African American man, Jake Cebron, stood in front of his home holding a Winchester rifle.
Spotting Cebron, the white terrorists opened fire on his cabin, with two bullets fatally striking his wife, Laura. Inside the cabin, law enforcement found Laura Cebron’s blood-splattered body and her three terrified children sitting on the bed, clinging to the sheets.
Thirteen years later, on August 11, 1911, Collin County authorities arrested a Farmersville man, Commodore Jones, for flirting with a white telephone operator. A year earlier, he had been arrested for supposedly engaging in the same behavior, but a grand jury declined to indict him for lack of evidence. This time, about 300 white people prevented a constable from taking Jones to a jail in McKinney. The mob instead carried Jones to the Farmersville public square and hanged him from a pole in front of the telephone office.
White-washed history
There are 242 historical markers in Collin County. Not one notes the murder of the Garcia family, the death of Laura Cebron or Jones’ hanging. The only place that notes Jones’s sadistic killing is 675 miles away from McKinney, at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
Collin County won’t honestly confront its sorry history of racial violence, but it does publicly celebrate white supremacy with a 7-foot statue of James W. Throckmorton, a Confederate general who adamantly opposed the 14th Amendment granting African Americans citizenship and Black voting rights. Throckmorton, who represented Collin County in the Legislature, served as governor from 1866-1867. He signed into law oppressive “Black Codes” sharply restricting African Americans’ freedoms before the federal government ended his regrettable tenure and removed him from office for being an “obstacle to Reconstruction.” He also participated in the genocide of Native Americans. The McKinney statue honoring him was erected in 1911, the same year Jones was slain. In 2021, the McKinney City Council tabled a proposal to remove the Throckmorton statue.
Racism defined Collin County politics beyond the terror of the early 20th century. In the mid-1920s, the Ku Klux Klan dominated civic life in Plano, as it did in Dallas and Fort Worth. In 1925, one group of white citizens petitioned the Plano City Council to force the removal of African Americans from the southern part of the city.
Many Collin County residents today have ancestors who fled Dallas to avoid school integration in the urban core. Once school busing began in Dallas, school enrollment there dropped even as the Collin County population exploded. The county’s transition from a rural backwater to a densely populated urban hub was fueled by the desire of parents to avoid their children attending classes with Black and brown children. Meanwhile, Collin County’s conservative leadership has exploited that rapid growth and the economic stimulus it provides to keep taxes much lower than many of its neighbors.
Paradoxically, these tax policies drew international corporations with diverse workforces that included immigrants from Africa, South Asia, China and elsewhere, creating the spectrum of color and culture the county’s white-flight generation sought to avoid. Non-whites accounted for most of the county’s population growth between 2021 and 2023, with Asian Americans representing almost 19 percent of the county’s total population.
Xenophobia and backlash
A ferocious backlash accompanied this transformation. In 2014, Collin County Commissioner Mark Reid proposed a policy blocking the children of undocumented families being housed near the border from being allowed to move into his jurisdiction. He claimed that the county would face an “Illegal immigrant tsunami” of children carrying “communicable diseases” unless legal barriers to their entry were erected.
The next year, Jeff Leach, who represents part of Collin County in the Texas Legislature, added fuel to a xenophobic fire, suggesting local Muslims planned to somehow impose sharia law and proposing a meaningless statewide ban that became law in 2017. Also in 2017, Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere ran an ultimately successful re-election campaign. However, he faced a racist backlash over the growth of apartment construction, which brought lower-income residents, often people of color. Critics called LaRosiliere “the mayor from Haiti,” referring to his birthplace but also suggesting the city had been taken over by a foreigner. He was accused of trying to turn the city into “another Harlem” even as one of his opponents used a not-too-subtle appeal to racism with the slogan “don’t Dallas my Plano.”
County political leaders spoon-fed Patrick Crusius this white supremacist gruel as he grew up in Allen. He heard loud and clear the message that disease-ridden aliens had invaded his homeland. He responded with a bloodthirsty vengeance. Crusius slaughtered 23 people at an El Paso Walmart on August 3, 2019, describing his massacres as a response to a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
History teaches us that hateful words often precede violent actions. A constant torrent of anti-Tutsi hatred on a Hutu-owned radio station in Rwanda that called the Tutsi minority “cockroaches’ and called for their extermination helped trigger a genocide from April to June in 1994, resulting in the death of 800,000 in that Central African country.
Similar words have been aimed at immigrants in Collin County today, but its political, educational and religious leadership has mostly responded with potentially deadly silence. Real leaders need to emerge and speak up. They need to inspire the community to reflect on the lessons of its troubled past before it is too late.