Texas Culture Wars in Historical Context: What 'Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature' Reveals
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Reading Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature (2018), a 22-page historical pamphlet I picked up in a legislative office last session is like holding a mirror to the present.
The document offers an unflinching account of how Texas—since its founding—has been shaped by racial hierarchy, exclusion, and the enduring efforts of Black, Mexican American, and other minoritized communities to claim the full rights of citizenship. I appreciate the honesty. However, what becomes abundantly clear is this: the culture wars roiling Texas today are not new. They are the latest iteration of a long struggle over whose history, humanity, and political power this state will recognize.
Texas was built as a slaveholding society, its early laws explicitly designed to secure racial domination. Black Texans were denied citizenship, movement, literacy, and basic protections. Tejanos (Spanish for 'Texan')—despite their leadership in the revolution and early Republic—were pushed to the margins once Anglos consolidated power.
After the Civil War, Reconstruction gains were met with Black Codes, Jim Crow statutes, and violent backlash. Mexican Americans faced parallel systems of segregation (“Juan Crow”), discriminatory policing, and routine exclusion from juries, schools, and the vote.
Yet the record also reminds us that resistance has always been part of the story—from Reconstruction legislators like Matthew Gaines and George Ruby, to Tejano lawmakers like Navarro and Seguin, to civil rights leaders such as Barbara Jordan, Héctor García, and the activists of LULAC, the NAACP, and the G.I. Forum. Each generation confronted efforts to roll back rights and narrow the definition of who counted as a “real” Texan.
Today’s culture wars follow this same pattern. Current battles—over teaching race and gender, restricting Ethnic Studies, banning books, suppressing voting rights, policing immigrants, and centralizing state authority over local communities—mirror earlier attempts to solidify racial power under the guise of “neutrality,” “order,” or “protecting children.”
Just as past lawmakers used Black Codes, literacy tests, poll taxes, and segregation statutes to preserve social hierarchy, today’s leaders deploy curriculum bans, border militarization, and mid-decade redistricting efforts to limit democratic participation and narrow the public imagination.
What the historical record makes clear is that Texas has repeatedly oscillated between moments of democratic expansion and reactionary retrenchment. The culture war is simply the latest backlash against multiracial democracy—another attempt to redefine belonging by silencing the histories and communities whose presence destabilizes myths of Anglo exceptionalism.
But history also teaches us that backlash never has the final word. The same state that produced Jim Crow also produced Barbara Jordan. The same state that once denied Tejanos entry into the legislature now sees Latino lawmakers shaping statewide policy. Every wave of repression has been met by movements that expand freedom and insist on truth.
We are living through another such moment. What is being targeted is not only DEI, Ethnic Studies, or “divisive concepts,” but the capacity of Texans to understand their own history and to build a multiracial, pluralistic democracy. The historical record reveals a simple truth: when Texas suppresses knowledge, it is preparing to suppress rights. When it restricts whose stories may be told, it is deciding whose lives matter.
Understanding the deeper historical roots of Texas’ culture war does not diminish its urgency—but it does give us clarity: we have inherited a long, unfinished struggle to make Texas the democratic society it claims to be. And as past generations showed, progress comes not from silence or retreat, but from organized, principled resistance.
History is not repeating itself—it is calling upon all people of good conscience to finish the work.
Reference
Senate Publications and Printing. (2018). Minority Civil Rights and the Texas Legislature. https://www.lrl.texas.gov/scanned/SIRSI/MinorityCivilRightsandtheTexasLegislature.pdf
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