The Texas Rangers are so deeply embedded in Texas culture and history that they make an appearance in the state’s public school curriculum. They embody the most revered and iconic law enforcement tradition in our state.
Christine Nix is the first black woman to serve in that hallowed division of the Texas Department of Public Safety. This year, she was inducted into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame. For that, and for her trailblazing career, she is a finalist for The Dallas Morning News Texan of the Year.
Today, Nix is a professor and department chair in the social work and criminal justice department at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. She has led a life we can all admire.
Nix was born into a military family in South Carolina, according to KCEN-TV, a Central Texas NBC affiliate, and her family eventually settled in Texas.
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Nix said in a 2018 KUT radio interview with In Black America that her father did not want her to join the military, but that she “had a little bit more spirit than that.” She went to college at 17 but couldn’t sign an ROTC contract before turning 18. Once she’d signed, she didn’t tell her father for two years.
“That’s kind of where I found myself, is in ROTC,” she said.
Nix said during the radio interview that she served as a patrol officer in the Temple Police Department while in the U.S. Army Reserve. In 1984, she joined the Texas Department of Public Safety, she wrote for Texas Monthly in 2004. Nix heard people talking about the Rangers while working as a recruiter, and she became interested.
In 1993, two women joined the Texas Rangers for the first time in the organization’s long history. The following year, Nix joined the group. She was the third woman and the first African American woman to become a Texas Ranger, Nix wrote.
Nix said “coming into the Rangers was not an easy thing, of course, knowing that it had been an all-male organization for such a long time,” according to a 1995 article in our archives.
Nix’s long career as an Army Reserve officer, local and state law enforcement officer, and university professor is nothing short of stratospheric. Her induction into the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame is well-deserved.
More Texan of the Year finalists here.