Sounds like they are trying to erase the great history of the black cowboy of the old west. Most of the cowboys were blacks - or Negros as they were called then.
Bass Reeves, one of the most famed U.S. Marshals was a Negro. There seems to be overwhelming evidence that he is the one that the Lone Ranger was modeled after.
Hmm - I wonder if calling a Negro back then a “black man” would be offensive. Like calling a white person “pale face”.
FROM THE WEB:
The word Negro was adopted from Spanish and Portuguese and first recorded from the mid 16th century. It remained the standard term throughout the 17th–19th centuries and was used by prominent black American campaigners such as W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington in the early 20th century. Since the Black Power movement of the 1960s, however, when the term black was favoured as the term to express racial pride, Negro (together with related words such as Negress) has dropped out of favour and now seems out of date or even offensive in both British and US English
Tough shiite, some of us were raised with the original adjectives as polite speech. The alternate back then was considered rude. I am out of date, sue me.
Being old now, I will not change my speech patterns to suit "modern" cultural BS. Nothing of current culture shows me the integrity to change.
Actually, there is little to no evidence that Bass Reeves was any kind of inspiration for the Lone Ranger.
http://martingrams.blogspot.com/2015/04/myth-debunked-bass-reeves-was-not-lone.html
I would also doubt that “most cowboys” of the old west were black, though a good number were.
I was just reading “The Nigger of the Narcissus” by J. Conrad surprised it hasn’t been banned yet.