'Women Have Always Been on the Front Lines.' How Five Women at the Texas Capitol Stood Up to 'Fascism.' [View all]

Tuesday morning, state Rep. Nicole Collier awoke from her seat on the floor of the Texas House, “bonnet and all,” after spending the night locked in the Capitol.

It’s an image that will go down in history.

In a photo posted online, the Fort Worth Democrat is wearing a dark blue eye mask and white and red blankets. They match her Texas flag, which marks a page in the book “African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals.” Next to her lies a pink-tasseled pillow that reads, over a rainbow, “Y’all means all.”

It’s immediately clear: None of these items were placed there by accident.

Collier — an attorney, a mother, and the first woman to represent Tarrant County’s House District 95 in North Texas — was protesting the decision by the Texas House to order 24/7 monitoring by DPS state troopers of Texas Democrats who broke quorum over the past two weeks. More than 50 Texas Democrats left the state last month for Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts to protest racist redistricting efforts by Texas Republicans. In addition to creating five more Republican seats in Congress, the Texas GOP’s redistricting map would substantially reduce the representation available to Black and brown Texans.

“If I’m telling you that there’s 26 seats and there are 11 million white residents, that breaks down to 430,000 white residents per congressional seat,” said state Rep. Vince Perez, a Democrat from El Paso, according to Houston Public Media. “So, what does it take for Latinos? Well, there’s one congressional seat for every 1.2 million Latinos, and there’s one Black seat for every 2 million Black voters. That’s why the value of a Latino resident in Texas is one-third of the political power of that that a white resident in Texas delivers, and again, for Black residents in Texas, it’s one-fifth.”

https://thebarbedwire.com/2025/08/19/how-five-women-at-the-texas-capitol-stood-up-against-fascism/