Jim Harrington Recounts The Texas Civil Rights Project

If you’re interested in modern Texas history, you could do worse than begin with Jim Harrington’s founder’s tale of The Texas Civil Rights Project. Although billed as a memoir, the book is much more judicial than personal. It recounts the highs and lows of what the lawyer counts as roughly 2,600 civil and human rights lawsuits – a number that seems modest in terms of the state and national reverberations of the courtroom and organizing actions inspired, supported, and defended by Harrington and his allies across the state of Texas. 

One might think they required hundreds of attorneys and staffers – in fact, a very few dedicated people carried the burden for all of us. Working with the South Texas Project, its successor the Texas Civil Rights Project, the United Farm Workers (where for 18 years he represented César Chavez and the UFW), and allied organizations, Harrington enabled farmworkers to organize for better conditions and better pay; exposed racially discriminatory policing; protected farmworkers and their families from toxic pollution; defended women and children from family violence; organized for grand jury reform; defended privacy rights and the rights of the disabled; and defended free speech and assembly rights against legal and police repression. 

At the outset, Harrington acknowledges that the book is not “a pure memoir in a literary sense,” since he wished to write “more about those with whom I labored in the vineyard, striving boldly for human rights and dignity, than about me.” You can learn quite a bit about Harrington’s character in the book, but largely indirectly. (He mentions his family, including his ex-wife, former United Farm Workers Texas Director Rebecca Flores – but only in the context of their mutual political work.)

He focuses on the stories of his clients – often colleagues in struggle – and how the causes they pursued amplified the legal cases built around those causes. He says he had to be “gently coaxed” into writing the book by friends and family, but decided to do so “as a way of paying respectful tribute to the people at the grassroots, la gente, who fought the good fight and committed themselves to the struggle, quite often at personal cost.” In doing so, Harrington has recorded an indispensable legal history of the ongoing fights for civil and human rights in Texas. 

It’s worth emphasizing that Harrington’s book appears at a particularly dark time in state and national politics, especially for the millions of Latino families (“la gente”), citizens, and immigrants explicitly targeted by the current regimes in Austin and Washington, D.C. The struggle continues, and this book is a part of that struggle.

Harrington’s method is simple and cumulative: He recounts a particular legal issue or lawsuit, briefly describes the people at its center, and reports the outcome, good, bad, or mixed. Nearly all the fights are difficult and complex. In a chapter on the surprising effectiveness of the Texas Equal Rights Amendment, he writes most proudly of what he calls the “trifecta” of victories enacting farmworker employment rights: inclusion in workers’ compensation, unemployment benefits, and limitations on the growers’ reckless use of pesticides. “If the only time given to me on earth was for these cases,” Harrington writes, “my life would have a ‘well-lived’ tag on it.”

As that quote suggests, Harrington’s inveterate earnestness can carry an edge of sanctimony. His career began as a Catholic seminarian in Michigan, where studying Spanish led him to work with migrant laborers – and a Saturday morning cartoon episode of Underdog, no less, inspired him to shift to law school, then the Rio Grande Valley, and the South Texas Project that began his lifelong work. A few years ago, he found his way back to the clergy; as a non-salaried priest, he directs Proyecto Santiago, a Hispanic outreach mission at St. James’ Episcopal.

(Dedicated as he is, I can testify that Harrington can occasionally be cantankerous. Decades ago, he objected to our Chronicle coverage of a police shooting, and then complained of my over-aggressive defense of the story. In retrospect, we were both partly wrong, but with a crucial difference: Harrington is a lawyer. Wanting to avoid becoming lawsuit No. 2,601, I apologized.) 

Harrington told an interviewer he had wanted to title the book Being a Badass, but was persuaded to something more sedate. He plays with the term throughout, although a little confusedly. “I never aspired to be a badass,” he begins, and then two pages later declares, “I decided early on to be a badass.” Maybe that reflects the limits of Episcopalian profanity, or of UT Press copyediting. In any case, Harrington has indeed been a heroic badass for justice, and has written an essential text on the struggle for human rights in Texas and the United States. 

This article appears in October 17 • 2025.