The Texas Civil Rights Project
The Texas Civil Rights Project
How We Built a Social Justice Movement
Texas civil rights icon Jim Harrington recounts his lifelong fight for equality, winning major reforms for farmworkers and disabled Texans and helping build a movement for social justice.
Jim Harrington arrived in South Texas in 1973, ready to file class action lawsuits and “save the world.” Over the following fifty years, he built one of Texas’s key civil rights organizations and played an essential role in many of its greatest victories.
Harrington takes readers on his journey from a Midwest seminary to a United Farm Workers office in the Rio Grande Valley and on to founding the Texas Civil Rights Project. He fought for the rights of a wide range of Texans, bringing justice to victims of police brutality, injured farmworkers, silenced students, and people with disabilities excluded from full participation in society, building a movement for social justice, and a family, along the way. These major gains were tempered by heartbreaking losses, and Harrington recounts the difficult work of persevering in the face of injustice.
Framed by a foreword from Judge Lora Livingston and an afterword by Congressman Greg Casar, The Texas Civil Rights Project is at once a history of the struggle for equality over the last fifty years, a celebration of the individuals and grassroots organizations who fought hard to improve the lives of others, and a memoir of a singular force who pushed the Texas justice system to live up to its ideals.
The Texas Civil Rights Project makes you feel you are there, with Jim, reliving the experiences, learning as he was, and gaining the motivation to follow his footsteps into activism. Jim’s life story gives us so many examples of faith in action and belief in one’s own power. This book is an inspiration and a blueprint for all who believe in justice.
The work of the [Texas] Civil Rights Project is critical in the struggle to bring about justice and equality.
The Texas Civil Rights Project's contribution to social justice is a wonder to behold! Jim Harrington's chronicle about TCRP is a must-read for anyone committed to making ours a more just world. In a time where uncertainty is shaking our hope for tomorrow, Jim reminds us of yesterday's darkest days and restores our hope that as long as we have the faith, the will, and the energy, there is hope that one day again 'we shall overcome!'
Jim Harrington founded the Texas Civil Rights Project and served as its director from 1990 to 2015. Previously, he led the South Texas Project, served as the Texas Civil Liberties Union’s lawyer, taught at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, and was César Chávez’s Texas attorney.
- Foreword by Lora J. Livingston
- Introduction: Past as Prologue—Justice on the Horizon?
- 1. The Early Years: From Michigan’s Strawberry Fields to South Texas
- 2. South Texas in the 1960s and 1970s: Upheaval, Resistance, and the Origin of the South Texas Project
- 3. Police Brutality, Act I: McAllen’s C-Shift Animals
- 4. Texas Grand Jury Reform: Sidelining the Good Old Boys
- 5. Farmworkers and Colonias on the Move
- 6. The Texas ERA Comes to the Rescue of Farmworkers and Minority Voters
- 7. Untethering from the Texas Civil Liberties Union: Birth of the Texas Civil Rights Project
- 8. Convincing Texas Businesses and Government to Respect People with Disabilities
- 9. The People Push Back: Free Speech and Assembly
- 10. Police Brutality, Act II: The More Cops Change . . .
- 11. Violence against Women and Sexual Bullying
- 12. Privacy: AIDS, Lie Detectors, and the Case of the Purloined Baby Blood
- 13. Daring to Sue the Supreme Court of Texas on Behalf of Low-Income Texans
- 14. Continuing the Good Fight: Other Fronts
- 15. International Human Rights: Solidarity
- 16. What Made TCRP Unique?
- 17. Final Thoughts: Keeping the Marathon Going
- Afterword by Greg Casar
- Acknowledgments
- Resources
- Index
Civil Rights in Black and Brown
Histories of Resistance and Struggle in Texas
Edited by Max Krochmal and Todd Moye
