Lize Burr:The last of us left at 4am in the morning. That’s when “End the War on Women” was projected onto the north side of that building. And when those of us who’d been there all day saw that on the outside of the building, we knew we’d lived through an historic night. That we would never forget what we’d done, and that other people had seen it, too. It was fantastic.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:I don’t know if this could have happened ten years ago without social media. It really was a People's Filibuster.

Ed Espinoza (Executive Director, Progress Texas):At first, Texas media was not covering the Capitol events. Our team happened to be at a conference of online organizers, so we started tweeting the #HB60 tag and asked everyone else to do the same. The tag started trending in two cities - Austin, TX and San Jose, CA. By the end of the night it was trending globally.

Brittany Yelverton:Rep. Donna Howard’s Chief of Staff, Scott Daigle, saw that there were still like 400 people there at 1:00am. He brought from Rep Howard’s office’s a tiny, tiny coffee pot, which makes 8 cups of coffee at a time. He started brewing coffee for what was essentially an army of people, 8 cups at a time. But he was going make it happen for us.

Heather Busby:Deep down in my heart I know people cared about this, that the majority of Texas does not support these restrictions on abortion. Seeing that manifest in front of my eyes was a relief. I had faith in Texas and Texas pulled through.

Brittany Yelverton:After Rep. Cook came back in and said he would give us another hour, one of the first people up to give public testimony was Leslie Simms. She made this statement and I’m going to paraphrase it, because I can’t remember it exactly, “Our stories and our lives are not repetitive, what is repetitive is your attack against us and your attacks on our bodies.” That was a beautiful summation of what so many of us were feeling.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:What I had to do was highlight to the public how extreme Republicans are, and in that I think we were successful.

Heather Busby:People were shouting. It was late, and I was just like, “Oh god are we going to riot? How do we diffuse this?” Reps. Jessica Farrar and Donna Howard helped the situation by allowing people to continue to speak. And it kind of fell over. It wasn’t a crazy, unruly mob.

Lize Burr:I was outraged, but I was also so worried, at all times, about people being endangered. I focused on how people are going to be comfortable, safe, heard. How are we going to deal with the anger and the repercussions for us - those of us who need to have this thing go for the 200-person filibuster that Rep. Farrar had laid out.

Andrea Grimes:I don’t think we realized the power of what we were doing in there until Byron Cook shut that meeting down and showed us how scared he was of what we had to say.

Lize Burr:I have observed him over several sessions, and knew from his demeanor how he was feeling during that hearing. I know when he is having a good hearing, and I know when he is having a bad hearing, and this was not a hearing he was enjoying.

Brittany Yelverton:This was owed to us. It was owed to us to have a space to speak as citizens of this state. We were supposed to be allowed our 3 minutes, and to see that right taken away.

Dan Solomon:The committee left the room and we thought they weren’t going to come back at all. They got mad that people were upset and decided they weren’t going to hear anyone anymore.

Jessica Luther:Dan Solomon and I ran into the hearing room from the overflow room, when we heard they were going to lock down the room. So I was sitting in the front of the room when Byron Cook left.

Lize Burr:I ran into the room, and I videotaped him stopping it. I have it on my phone to this day -it was a jaw-dropping moment. That was the time when the social media component really took off.

Dan Solomon:( Quoting from his story in the Austin Chronicle ): Rep. Byron Cook – the committee chair – suddenly declares that the testimony will be ending regardless of how many people are still waiting to speak. Because he’s bored. “The testimony has been impassioned, but it has become repetitive, so I am going to only allow another hour of testimony on this bill.”

Jessica Luther (Activist):I think Rep. Farrar at some point said or implied that they had messed with the lists. And that’s something that can come out of last summer. They need to be way more transparent about that process.

Andrea Grimes:Once they figured out how many people were there to say what they were there to say, they tried to over-represent the anti-choice point of view.

Terri Burke:Within 15 minutes of Chairman Cook announcing there were 500 more speakers lined up and he was cutting it off in three hours, the doors opened and more young people poured in, asking how to sign up to speak. When told it was being cut off, they stayed. They never left.

Dan Solomon (Freelance Reporter, Austin Chronicle):The whole thing kind of felt like a lock-in. I was watching Game 7 of the Spurs game on my iPad on the side.

Brittany Yelverton:That was the first night we got an unsolicited food donation. It must’ve been 12, maybe 11 pm at night, and some guy came up to me and was like, “We got 15 pizzas here from Randy in California.” I was thinking, “Who in the world is Randy from California?” That was the beginning of what I think was one of the most surprising elements. The floodgates of people from Wisconsin or Guatemala or New Jersey sending us donations because they were watching us from across the globe and felt such a deep feeling of solidarity with what was happening with this movement.

Heather Busby:Overflow rooms were a lot of fun because you could actually clap and cheer and jeer depending on what was being said. The community that was built up in those rooms was really fun, too. When people would get called up to testify, everyone was cheering them on. So many folks — and specifically young people — would tell me, “You know, I didn’t know you could do this. I’ve never been to the Capitol.”

Brittany Yelverton:But then you also had women in their 60s and 70s and 80s, and people of all genders, who were older and who had fought this fight before. And somehow they found the energy and passion to come back out again. You had such a diversity of people.

Terri Burke (Executive Director, ACLU of Texas):I testified about 7:00pm I left for dinner. When I returned, instead of one overflow room there were suddenly three, two of which were filled with “our side.” More important, those two rooms were filled with young people. I had never seen so many young people at the Lege — at least not in the last four legislative sessions. It was like walking through a college dorm. They were sitting on the floor, in the window ledges, on the tables, all on their iPads, tweeting and chatting and summoning more.

Tina Hester (Executive Director, Jane's Due Process):I was called early to testify, which I wasn't quite ready for — I thought I had many hours. I'm from Lubbock, Texas, and I'm just used to these good ol' boys. It's sometimes more frustrating to hear your opponents testify. You just shake your head in disbelief that they can actually say what they say.

Andrea Grimes:It became personal for me so quickly. I mean it’s already personal because I do this work because I care about reproductive justice. But it had never felt so imperative. I’m used to big journalism not caring about this kind of thing until it becomes a crisis. You know, when 6 clinics are open. So I expected it be the thankless kind of reporting that I’ve become used to, but it was the opposite of thankless. It was so gratifying.

Amy Hagstrom Miller (Founder & CEO, Whole Woman's Health):Watching people stand up for three minutes at a time and tell their abortion stories, one woman after the other after the other — I could see the abortion stigma melting away in a way I’d been trying to encourage and make happen for years. Some people were righteous and happy and unapologetic, and other people knew they made the right choice but were sad. Others had God in their conversation, and other people were vocal in saying, “Now I have a baby. I had an abortion and I don’t regret it.” It was just as complex as abortion is. It was like a rite of passage to tell your story and you became part of this group and it wasn’t isolating.

Brittany Yelverton:We were hoping that could be the kind of crowd we could amass. So when we hit the number that we hit that night — 700 people registering their position — it was just overwhelming.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:We use the iPad now, and you can see now how many witnesses have testified, who is testifying, what their position is, and how many are left. Typically, as the hearing goes on the number of witnesses goes down. I’m looking for that magical 200 number, and when I opened my iPad there was just over 700 people who were lined up.

Andrea Grimes (Reporter, RH Reality Check):On the morning of the people's filibuster, I thought, “OK, this is going to be just another committee meeting, we might have a lot show up, but you know I’m going to be home by 9 and go to the bar with my husband.”

Brittany Yelverton (Organizer, Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas):I reached out to our rapid response team and we said, “If you would come out and testify, even just share your position if you don’t feel comfortable vocalizing your personal experience, or just pass this along to your network.”

Heather Busby (Executive Director, NARAL Pro-Choice Texas):We were all reaching out to our lists. It was us, Planned Parenthood, Lize Burr, Mary Gonzales’s office, Whole Woman’s Health. It started out with a small group of us putting out the call, and then it spread like wildfire.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:So, I just started counting backwards. Sine Die — the last day of session — was on Tuesday, and the hearing was at 1:00pm on Thursday. If I could get to Friday then possibly a filibuster could be in reach, if we could also do some stuff on the floor on the weekend. 3 minutes a person plus questions I could ask from the dais, I said we need 200 people - in the middle of the week, in the middle of the day, to speak about this.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:It had everything to do with David Dewhurst winning a primary. Which he failed to do. So now not only did he lose his primary, but the women of Texas lost because of his political ploy. And I knew that I couldn’t win on the inside because of the rules. I’d have to win on the outside with public pressure. That’s when Lize Burr and I became peas in a pod.

Rep. Donna Howard:Once the first Special Session was called, we knew that the addition of an anti-abortion item was a distinct possibility. We also saw a group of conservative lawmakers sign onto a letter to the Governor, asking him to add a number of anti-abortion measures to the call.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:That’s basically what I did all session - make sure these bills never saw the light of day. It’s like one of those games where the little heads keep popping up, and as soon as you hit one down another one pops back up.

Rep. Donna Howard:It was clear that some of the members had a strong desire to pass greater restrictions on abortion rights or further demonize providers like Planned Parenthood. Thankfully, however, none of these bills were brought up for debate on the House or Senate floors. I believe that this was primarily because of a concerted effort among members like myself to avoid the long, ugly floor fights that we had seen in 2011.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:Before the session, I worked real hard to get a slot on the State Affairs Committee. I knew that was going to be an important committee for reproductive justice issues. I assembled key members to ensure I could stop any bills or slow them down.

Forrest Wilder (Reporter, Texas Observer):This is one of those issues that, in the context of an explosive legislative fight like that, you kind of got to play ball with your team, even if you don’t agree with this particular issue.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte:I was on the phone with the other Senators, and it was the other Senators — particularly Senator Lucio - who said, “I will not do this at the regular time, unless Senator Van de Putte is here.” It goes to show you the working relationships of the senators. Governor Dewhurst set it for 7:00pm. The Senators denied that vote, honoring another Senator who had lost her dad.

Lize Burr:It was a sign of what David Dewhurst was willing to do. We got on the phone with women in Hidalgo and Cameron Counties, and they started calls to Senator Lucio’s office immediately. There were calls going into his office by 11:00am that Monday, letting him know he can’t break with the Democrats and go against Senate tradition at a time when Sen. Van de Putte was going through a family loss. We didn’t know until he got out onto that floor what he was going to do — at least I didn’t.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte:I asked Governor Dewhurst if he would give me an hour and a half notice before any major vote was taken. And he did. On Monday, he gave me notice that they were going to start to take up the bill at 7:00pm on Monday night — which was the exact hour of my father’s rosary.

Ruth Gilgenbach (Activist):The Senate was contemplating changing the rules about how many people had to be there to vote so that they could exploit the fact that Sen. Van de Putte's father had died.

Lize Burr:The next morning [Monday], we were watching the clock. The longer until they came in, the longer the bill had to lay out. It was get it to 11, don’t vote until 11. Fortunately they went as long as they did, but at the same time, we knew the bill was going over to the Senate.

Jessica Luther:That night, that Sunday night before the filibuster, I remember Blake Rocap coming up to us and saying, “There’s a senator willing to filibuster.” He wouldn’t tell us who it was, and only said, “Whoever it is, they are prepared to do it for 36 hours.”

Lize Burr:Really the people who made it happen, were the Representatives who came out at 3 or 4 in the morning and spoke to us who were still there on the staircase. I can still picture all of them being there and being completely floored, and their words and encouragement. They were gracious at a time when it was an insane time to be gracious.

Jessica Luther:Kirk Watson came in to speak with all of us and I didn’t even know who Kirk Watson was! Which is so funny to think about now. The learning curve was so fast for someone like me who had no knowledge of how any of this worked, who our state legislators were, like nothing.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:What I set out to do was to make a public fight so that we never have to fight this anymore. My reasoning was that if Republicans are going to bring this up to win elections, that they feel the burn as a repercussion for bringing these issues up.

Dan Solomon:That’s the biggest difference - how you carry yourself when you are pretty sure you’re going to win, versus how you carry yourself when you’re more likely to lose.

Lize Burr:That’s when we were also telling people you cannot yell, you cannot scream. That’s when we were doing the waving our hands - we were still doing jazz hands at that point. We weren’t getting tossed out for doing that.

Ed Espinoza:Then DPS officers said a demonstration of any kind would result in citizens being ejected from the Capitol. They considered clapping a demonstration.

Brittany Yelverton:And then when she took the coat hanger, left it on the mic, and walked away. It was like a very professional mic drop.

Rep. Senfronia Thompson:When I was a young woman, I was pregnant with my first child, and I had a neighbor who was a mother of five kids, and her husband walked out on her. She was a maid at a local hospital there, Jefferson Davis Hospital, and she had two older kids who were boys who were out working low-wage jobs to try and help their momma make ends meet. After a few years, she met a guy that she started dating. At that period of time there was no contraceptives — it was unheard of, except the rhythm method. Sometimes it worked for them and sometimes it didn’t. Most times it didn’t work. And she got pregnant. When she got pregnant with this man, she later learned her oldest daughter had gotten pregnant out of wedlock. The momma was about four months pregnant, and her daughter was just starting to show, so I’d say she was two, two-and-a-half months. So the mother decided one night to have a back-alley abortion. The lady she went to used a coat hanger, and she never survived. And I never forgot that. There she was, not trying to be pregnant when her first grandchild was going to make its entry into the world because she wanted to be available for her daughter’s child. And in the process of doing this she loses her life, through an illegal abortion with a coat hanger. She hemorrhaged to death. That’s the reason why I used that coat hanger in my remarks. I always remember her — Mrs. Bell, that was her name. And I always think about her when abortion is talked about. I always think about that coat hanger. There’s probably many women who saw the end of their journey in life the same way. Women whose names remain nameless and faceless to this day.

Rep. Senfronia Thompson:I thought the bill’s opponents would understand that no person chooses to be raped, and that when a person is raped - or a victim of incest - it is a very traumatic experience. And then to force that person to carry the fetus to full term is something that I think is onerous on the victim. It puts the person in several untenable positions. You are making that person, everyday, remind themselves what happened to them. And then society is forcing them, whether it is incest or rape, to caryy that pregnancy. I think its really unfortunate that women are forced by society to not have those choices.

Heather Busby:Rep. Jodie Laubenberg made her comment about the rape kit and the representatives that were fighting for us basically shut her down.

Lize Burr:When it got to the amendments, it was incredible - but it was really hard to believe.

Yvonne Gutierrez:We were camped out in Rep. Farrar’s office, food and people were everywhere and we were all watching the debate continue on the three television sets in her office. I was fielding texts and phone calls from House members and their staff with questions and updates. We were all on pins and needles. I will never forget the level of anxiousness that night.

Rep. Donna Howard:I offered up three amendments for the SB 5 floor debate. Unfortunately, all of my amendments failed to be placed on the bill. It was particularly galling to have my safe harbor amendment defeated, since it was borne out of conversations with health providers. It was just one further example of the bill's authors ignoring the testimony of medical professionals.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:My colleagues - they’d just done a regular session, they wanted to get home, spouses are giving them the evil eye, children and dogs don’t recognize you — they want to go home. But when they stepped into the House Chamber and they saw the gallery just swell with orange shirted people, they were uplifted.

Andrea Grimes:I was in the chamber for the entire time that night. It was the night I fell in love with Rep. Gene Wu. He and Rep. Dawnna Dukes were doing this back and forth, “Where you aware…, Mr. Wu?” “No I was not Ms. Dukes…” These two representatives are just standing there and running out the clock, asking each other the most asinine and obvious questions to suck up the entire time that they had on the floor. “Were you aware that one in three women who have abortions are already mothers?” “Well in fact, I thought it was closer to two in three.” It was just hysterical and well-timed and evocative.

Rep. Jessica Farrar:When the issue hit the floor, we had to figure how to eat the clock up. Our office, volunteers who came in, and staffs from other offices as well worked very hard to get questions to the back mic, to get possible amendments, and all kinds of things we could do to basically eat up the clock so we could get within that filibuster striking range.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte:Not enough credit has been given to our House members, who absolutely did the work. We’re Democrats operating in a Republican controlled legislative body. We have to know the rules, and we have to utilize them in a manner to protect our constituents. Our House members did an incredible job.

Lize Burr:People started to get to know each other. They waited all day. They watched the proceedings in the auditorium. People also started to see the hardball tactics that were going to be used against us.

Brittany Yelverton:The auditorium had become part of the overflow room, and that became such an inclusive, communal, supportive space, where people were able to listen to testimony when the gallery was filled, or prepare their testimony and practice with other people. There was an immense feeling of family and community.

Dan Solomon:I was shocked that more people came the second day than the first day, because I thought after that Thursday, well we’re done. We’ve seen what happens and it doesn’t work. I thought people were there to run out the clock, and when that was no longer an option I thought people were going to stop coming. I was shocked that it grew like it did.

Heather Busby:I walked into the rotunda, and I looked up and saw all those people filling that building. It was this immense feeling of what we were doing matters. Reproductive rights, reproductive freedom, and access to abortion are important to Texans. This is something they are going to take time out of their busy lives to protect. And I saw Lize Burr on the Capitol rotunda floor, and I just hugged her and cried and said, “All these people are here for this.”

Brittany Yelverton:Whole Woman’s Health and the other coalition partners decided that orange would be the color. To see all of a sudden this visual representation of a sea of orange — to see over a thousand people who were deeply invested in this movement and deeply cared about reproductive justice. That’s when a switch flipped in mind: we can change the course of history in Texas.

Amy Hagstrom Miller:We designed that bright orange t-shirt at the beginning of the regular session. Who knew that orange would become such a big thing.

Heather Busby:By the time I got back to Austin and the Capitol that day, Planned Parenthood had already given out 1,000 Stand with Texas Women orange t-shirts.

Brittany Yelverton:A couple of us would hop on phone calls to figure out how we wanted to phrase this ask to our rapid response team. We came up with, “Come early, stay late, wear orange.”

Heather Busby:Everything up until then was done through texting and emails and phone calls. There wasn’t really a lot of planning, it was just rapid response, adaptability, and moving and changing with what was happening. I went over my text limit and had to add to my plan.

Lize Burr:We were trying to time this whole thing out. There was a concern that if we asked people to come too early, they’re not going to want to stay.

Yvonne Gutierrez (Executive Director, Planned Parenthood Texas Votes):The House strategy to get to a filibuster included all hands on deck. Blake Rocap from NARAL and I worked very closely with House members and their staff, especially Rep. Farrar and Rep. Chris Turner, on more than 50 amendments covering every provision of the legislation.

The following is an overview of the floor fight in the Texas House of Representatives on Sunday & Monday, June 23 & 24.

Chapter 3 The Davis Filibuster

Tuesday, June 25. By day’s end, a livestream of the 13-hour filibuster would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people across the world.

Dan Solomon:That day is pretty hazy. That was a very long day.

Yvonne Gutierrez:Sen. Kirk Watson was willing to do it and there were a couple of days of back-and-forth, but in the end it needed to be a woman - and Sen. Wendy Davis was the clear choice. She had the most to lose and to gain.

Sen. Wendy Davis:A few days before the bill reached the Senate floor, the Senate Democratic Caucus held a meeting where we -- as a group -- decided to filibuster the bill. Several Senators were willing to do it, and I was selected by my colleagues. I was motivated by the fact that thousands of people were yearning to be heard on this issue and were turned away. The health care and reproductive rights of Texas women were at stake, and I decided that I was going to attempt a filibuster in order give voice to the people who felt that their voices weren’t being heard.

Brittany Yelverton:I was in Senator Davis’s office about 9:30 or 10:00am that morning printing out stories and on calls trying to get all this material together for senate staffers. I saw her walk out and I thought: “Oh wow, this is happening. Something huge and remarkable is about to take place.”

Yvonne Gutierrez:I took Cecile Richards to visit the members before they gaveled in. She got some time with Wendy - she was ready, but no one had any idea what that day was going to be like. Of course Dewhurst took it up right away.

Andrea Grimes:I remember when they were getting things rolling and around 11 o’clock in the morning. And I’m sitting there prepared to do my court reporter transcribing of the whole shebang. And Dewhurst asks if she’s going to talk and she says, “Yes, Lieutenant Governor, I intend to speak for an extended length of time.” And I remember transcribing that, tweeting it and the timestamp was 11:18am. I will remember that forever. I was like, “This is happening. There is a woman on the floor of the senate talking about abortion.”

Heather Busby:Wendy Davis was fearless. She stood up for us, literally and figuratively, in her iconic pink running shoes. She was under intense scrutiny the whole time, but she remained strong and poised until the very end.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

Jessica Luther:That’s another great thing about last summer: HB2 and SB5 were about abortion. It was much narrower than reproductive health. She stood on that floor to make sure people had access to abortion the medical procedure.

Brittany Yelverton:A lot of the stories that were passed along were actually testimonies people had written and registered to share at prior house or committee hearings, but never had the opportunity to give voice to those stories.

Heather Busby:Carol Metcalf, who was the last person to testify in the 20 week ban regular session House hearing and also submitted her testimony during the People's Filibuster, couldn’t be at Wendy’s filibuster. Wendy started reading Carol’s story — about a fetal anomaly and having to say goodbye to her wanted pregnancy because her daughter wasn’t going to live — and she started to cry and paused, and I’m like, “Don’t pause too long, because that’s one of the ways they can ding you.” I texted Carol and said “Wendy’s reading your story and she’s crying.”

Brittany Yelverton:I remember seeing Julie Gilles, who had written a testimony but hadn’t gotten the chance to share it, crying when Wendy Davis started reading her words.

Lize Burr:I started to hear Sen. Davis read something, and I knew it was my friend. And I looked over at her, who - she wasn’t in my section, but was just one over - and she was just sitting there, silently weeping. We were sitting in silence, listening to these stories. And among us - in the gallery itself - were the women whose stories they were.

Sen. Wendy Davis:Before I took the floor that morning to begin the longest thirteen hours of my life, I worked to track down every single page of testimony that was submitted in committee, but not read. And during the next hours, I read every single one of their stories out loud. These were personal stories about an issue that mattered deeply to women fighting across the state. As word spread about what was happening in the Capitol, more than 16,000 letters poured in. I stopped worrying about running out of stories and started worrying about running out of time. I was honored to give voice to their stories.

Forrest Wilder:This was a long time coming. From a perspective of a lot of Texans, this kind of whittling away of abortion rights and anti-woman streak among some conservatives and Tea Party types, when you put all that together with Wendy Davis to put her body on the line literally and figuratively you had all the ingredients for a singular moment for all that I’ve seen in Texas politics.

Merritt Tierce (Executive Director, Texas Equal Access Fund):I went to the filibuster with my husband and our twelve year old daughter. We drove from Dallas - by the time we got there, there was a very long line to get into the gallery.

Heather Busby:Walking that line of people waiting to get into the gallery was incredible. It wrapped around the rotunda, up and down stairs, down hallways.

Photo Credit: Reuters

Lindsay Rodriguez (President - The Lilith Fund):The overflow room in particular was pretty intense because any time anybody said something — it was just like watching a movie--people were booing the villains and cheering the heroes. And it was very emotional.

Katie Naranjo (CEO, GNI Strategies):I was in the gallery and had been sitting there all day, since 10 AM that morning. We weren’t allowed to have food or anything to drink in the gallery. We also weren’t allowed to be loud or to talk.

Brittany Yelverton:When they closed the door to the capitol that night because it was “at capacity” — which I did not think was feasible for that building — it was like a red velvet rope club. That’s how many people wanted to get in and how many people wanted to participate in democracy.

Katie Naranjo:So we were sitting in very still positions for 12 hours not really able to do anything, because if you left you gave up your seat.

Dan Solomon:The thing about the filibuster, and the entire performance of the filibuster, is that it wasn’t politics and it wasn’t theater. It was sports. It was an endurance test. It was the best sporting event I’d ever been to, because it was a contest to see who could endure and who could come up with the right play at the right time. Lize Burr:It was more like watching a fixed fight.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte:The day of the filibuster, I really wasn’t prepared to engage in the debate. I hadn’t even planned on being there. It was a very sad day for our family, as we had just buried our dad. It was a very late funeral, at about 4:30 in the afternoon in San Antonio. But I did return to the Capitol. And what was absolutely incredible to witness was not just the strength of my sister, my colleague, Wendy Davis, but the presiding officers just throwing the rule book overboard.

Photo Credit: Texas Tribune

Sen. Kirk Watson:That somehow a reference to Planned Parenthood funding was not germane — and another ruling that my questions to Sen. Davis about Roe v. Wade weren't germane — to a discussion about limiting abortion rights revealed how far the Lt. Governor was willing to stretch and how incredible this all was likely to be. We knew we were in a fight where the other side wouldn't be fair.

Lindsay Rodriguez:If you’d told me that that many people would be tuned in to parliamentary discussions at the Texas Legislature I would tell you that you were crazy.

Ed Espinoza:Something that is easy to forget — Sen. Davis didn’t sit down the entire time, even after they called the bogus third point of order.

Sen. Wendy Davis:If I had seated myself at that point it would have brought the filibuster to an end. Even though the 3rd point of order had been called, it had not yet been fully ruled on. I continued to stand to give voice to the thousands of people in the Capitol and across the state who have a stake in this issue.

Yvonne Gutierrez:I was standing in the middle of the rotunda with Cecile Richards and thousands of people were all around us – midnight was soon approaching and Sen. Davis had received her third point of order. I was texting back and forth with members of the Senate and their staff trying to get a sense of what was happening minute by minute as the Senators continued to make parliamentary inquiries.

Andrea Grimes:That third strike moment was the thing I had been holding my breath for. Going into the People's Filibuster I expected failure, and the next day I expected us to be overridden by some sort of procedural thing. Everyday I went, I would think, “Today is the day this thing ends.” Because it can’t be that we are doing this thing.

Sen. Kirk Watson:I spent a significant part of the day talking with the Parliamentarian and the Lt. Governor about being fair and pushing back on suggestions that they might reverse previous rulings. Of course, the final strike — saying that somehow discussion of a bill that impacted the rights of women by requiring a sonogram was not germane to the bill being filibustered — was the true proof of how far they'd go.

Andrea Grimes:And so when the third strike came down, I thought, “Well this is it. that’s how this ends.” I was so mad. And then Kirk Watson got up there like a baller and drug that thing out for two more hours.

Sen. Kirk Watson:The ultimate goal was to get to midnight. That meant I wanted a debatable motion that required discussion. I knew the Lt. Governor would have to give up the gavel. I actually was surprised he did it so fast. I also knew we'd have some debate and I intended for it to be as thorough as they'd allow. I was going to "filibuster the filibuster." The shifting rules and conditions required me to also be somewhat nimble.

Ruth Gilgenbach:The gallery had been so quiet, we had played by all of their stupid rules to be allowed to stay and be witness to the stories that Wendy Davis was telling on behalf of women who hadn't been allowed to speak for themselves, and it didn't matter. The Republicans were going to break all of the rules to get this done now.

Forrest Wilder:The conditions were there for an explosive and dramatic fight. If you take away some of the bungling by Dewhurst, if you take away some of the mean-spiritedness, aggressiveness and extremism on the part of Republicans, then it probably wouldn’t have been quite so explosive.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte:When I said, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be heard over the male colleagues in the room,” it was out of pure anger and frustration. I raised my hand. I spoke out, and the gallery heard me. The press table heard me. But my mic was purposefully turned off — as I learned later, all the Democrats mics were turned off.

Ruth GilgenbachThat question encapsulated so much of what I had been feeling — all of my frustration at the system, at Republican lawmakers who were smugly ignoring the stories that Wendy Davis was reading, at lawmakers playing Candy Crush on their smartphones instead of paying attention.

Sen. Leticia Van De Putte:I knew that I was in order to be recognized. I know that process-wise, I should have been recognized. But I think that that signified the frustration that we had — is that they weren’t listening to to women. They weren’t listening. And that was pure anger and frustration. But it encapsulated what had been the whole process for this bill on women’s reproductive health.

Andrea Grimes:My best friend and I were watching the live feed of the last 20 minutes — right before Leticia Van de Putte stood up and asked her question. At first we thought something was wrong with the live feed, that the sound was gone or something, and we were like, “NO, we can’t hear! What’s happening?!” And then it turns out that we couldn’t hear, because you couldn’t hear in that room. I remember holding my friend Carrie’s hand, but we couldn’t look at each other because we were going to cry.

Katie Naranjo:We were so angry because we were sitting there the whole day just watching the Republicans completely mistreat the process. We were so frustrated that our voices weren’t being heard. That’s when we started screaming and kind of taking over the process.

Yvonne Gutierrez:I was texting Senator Van de Putte asking what we should do with the restless — but certainly orderly — people all around us who had come to witness the event and show their support for Sen. Davis. Sen. Van de Putte texted me to try to keep them quiet and minutes later she let me know that the gallery had erupted and it was go time.

Katie Naranjo:I remember looking down and all the senators were like, “No, don’t! Be quiet. You’re going to get arrested. Stop!” I worked for a number of the senators at the time and I was like, “Oh crap, all my bosses are telling me to be quiet and we’re not. We’re not going to be quiet.” But once they realized that it was getting closer and closer to midnight, they started saying, “No, keep this going. Keep this up.” They got it, they understood.

Jessica Luther:My initial reaction was like, “Oh no we’re going to get in trouble.” And then I looked over and Cecile Richards was screaming her face off. And I was like, “OK, this is on.” Merritt Tierce:We were shouting so loudly by the end of the night that the building shook. I mean, it's a granite building.

Heather Busby:Everyone erupted. We all did that collectively as the people of Texas. We defeated legislation in the most grassroots way you can defeat legislation.

Dan Solomon:I was three stories down under some pretty thick limestone, and you could feel the building move from the sub-basement. It was incredible.

Ruth GilgenbachWe yelled. It was hours, weeks, years worth of frustration at being told to be quiet, being ignored, being patronized with claims that this bill was for "women's safety" when anyone who's been paying attention knows that the opposite is true--all coming out in one long, cathartic roar of frustration.

Lize Burr:The only thing that was unruly was when we stood up and yelled - and that wasn’t unruly, that was necessary.

Photo Credit: Associated Press

Lindsay Rodriguez:The other side thinks that the yelling was a planned thing, but the outrage was so organic and just rippled through the crowd. We started getting word through Twitter and text messages, because we weren’t in the gallery, that they couldn’t hear what was going on because of the yelling.

Merritt Tierce:Twitter was the only way we knew what was going on inside the chamber. That was a really great example of democracy at work. Even if the Texas Tribune hadn't been there, there was no way that what was happening in that chamber could be hidden.

Ruth GilgenbachEveryone knows that they could win by playing by the rules, but that would be too hard, would take too long, would be too "boring," so instead, they cheated -- like, we're just going to do it this other way, where we don't have to listen to the stories of women who we'll be hurting, we don't have to listen to Wendy Davis tell their stories for them, and we don't have to acknowledge that the clock ran out before we could take the vote at midnight.

Andrea Grimes:As soon as Dewhurst, said, “Oh no, no, we’ve passed it.” I was like, "No you fucking didn’t, you did not.” I was looking at the clock on my computer and looking at the clock on the feed. And soon as I saw the screenshots, I was like, “Good luck, guys.”

Lize Burr:We had this major moment, in the rotunda, where we needed to have the right kind of lawyers on hand. Cecile Richards said she needed a jail buddy, so I volunteered, but we ended up not needing to get arrested.

JD Gins (Executive Director, Travis County Democratic Party):I heard they had arrested an elderly woman, and I went back to the Senate door to see what was happening with the arrest. That’s when they arrested me, too — took me to County Jail and processed me. When I got to jail, the elderly woman they had arrested, Martha Northington, was there. She had been sitting there quietly all day, doing her crossword puzzle, and she was actually following the rules, and not being unruly. She was just watching from the gallery, and when they came to clear out the gallery she was really offended. You know? “Why do I have to go, I haven’t done anything wrong.” And they man-handled her. The officer who arrested her gave her bruises all over her arms, and just really made a big mistake.

Lindsay Rodriguez:Everybody was there together. Being part of that crowd and the outrage flowing out into the halls and up and down the stairs, chanting, cheering, yelling, and then watching them try to change the timestamp when they couldn’t get the vote through. It was so surreal. It felt like it couldn’t be happening.

Lize Burr:Since the previous Saturday, I’d had a portable PA in Rep. Jessica Farrar’s office. I brought it into the center of the rotunda, and Bill Kelly, who was working for Planned Parenthood, held it for Cecile Richards to talk and tell us what was going on.

Dan Solomon:The fact that it worked that way - the fact that it did have that really neat cinematic feel to it, where it was a contest, there were ups and downs to the day, there was a narrative arc to the day - that doesn’t happen in real life. And that it came down to the thing that it started as, with people being the ones responsible for making the statements. You can’t script it that way.

Tina Hester:It’s 1:30am, I’m exhausted and tired and looking for a place to get gas. I’ve got my orange shirt on, I get out of the car, and this woman looks at me and says, "You were there, weren't you? I was there too. Wasn’t that the most exciting point in your life?”

Andrea Grimes:It was 3:00am when they finally confirmed it had been blocked. I went up to the second level just to watch Davis come through. She had all the TV cameras following her so they had the bright lights on her. And she was like this bright light moving through the crowd.

Merritt Tierce:We drove home that night and didn't get home until 4:00am. My daughter slept the whole trip and when we got there, she woke up and asked, “Did we win?”

JD Gins:We don’t win very often, but that night we won.

Jessica Luther:I’m still floored that it was in Texas that a senator stood on the floor of the senate and read abortion stories. That alone will forever be amazing. How brilliant she was from beginning to end in such an incredibly hostile space was just breathtaking. I believe in her. It could not have been better.

Sarah Schimmer (Activist):After we left the gallery, I took my daughter through the Capitol and showed her the picture of Ann Richards. She’s the only woman in the lower portion of the portrait gallery of the Capitol. So I caught that picture on my iPhone, of my daughter looking up at the Ann Richards portrait. I think that really captured the spirit of why we were there and why it was important.

Photo Credit: Sarah Schimmer

Jessica Luther:Before I left that night, I went into Farrar’s office. And Rep. Farrar was in there. And she was so happy. And she came up to and just gave me the best hug of my whole life. One of best moments because she’s such a hero. By that point, I don’t even know if she had slept in a week.