Communities of color have long been subject to extreme policing and surveillance in Texas. Despite such formidable challenges, these communities have launched multiple movements to ensure public safety and equal treatment before the law. Looking for Justice in Texas provides historical context for these contemporary problems by examining potent examples of over-policing and multiple acts of resistance that took place in the Lone Star State during the twentieth century.
The contributors to this edited volume, both established and emerging scholars, employ original research to demonstrate that the over-policing of African Americans, Mexican Americans, and immigrants has an extensive history in Texas. Looking for Justice delves into a range of pertinent topics, including how the circuits of power link borderlands policing to law enforcement in other states, white club women's support for the installation of a Confederate memorial and the removal of a middle-class African-American community, the influence of the Ku Klux Klan in the establishment of local police departments, the courts' role in racial and gender-based discrimination against African Americans in East Texas the racialization of citizenship as a result of moral policing, the mobilization of Chicanos in response to anti-Mexican violence, and connections between the racialization of US citizenship and the policing of African immigrants.
While much progress has been made in the struggle for justice, significant challenges remain among the state's communities of color. As volume editor Omar Valerio-Jiménez emphasizes in his thought-provoking conclusion, Texas's history of policing and struggles for racial justice are particularly relevant and important to understand in the present day if more progress is to be achieved.
