After the Civil War two amendments were added to the U.S. Constitution that explicitly guaranteed the rights of African Americans as citizens. The 14th Amendment (ratified in 1868) prohibited states from denying the "equal protection" of its laws to any person. The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (ratified in 1870) affirmed that "[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Show Though they were written into the foundational document of our government, these guarantees were not very well secured in the states of the former Confederacy in the decades after Reconstruction. Various legal and illegal tools were developed on the state level to disenfranchise African Americans and other minorities. One tool particularly favored in Texas was the "white primary," originally established by internal political party rules and later by state law. The basic idea was to explicitly prohibit non-whites (African Americans primarily, but also Mexican Americans in south Texas) from joining the Democratic Party or participating in its the primary elections. Because the Democratic Party dominated the political systems of all the Southern states after Reconstruction, its state and local primary elections usually determined which candidate would ultimately win office in the general election. Thus, any voters excluded from the Democratic primary were effectively excluded from exercising any meaningful electoral choice. In Texas after the turn of the twentieth century many local party leaders adopted rules that barred African Americans (and Mexican Americans in south Texas) from voting in Democratic Party primary elections. But, when the Texas Legislature passed a law in 1923 explicitly barring African Americans from participating in the Democratic Party primary, it fired the opening salvo in a two-decade long legal and political struggle whose outcome hinged on whether a party could or should be regarded as a private entity with the right to establish its own internal rules. The 1923 law was overturned as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) for violating the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. The decision addressed only the facts of the case before it, which concerned state law not the policies of individual political parties. In response the Texas Legislature passed a new law allowing the executive committee of each state party to decide who could vote in its own primary. In Nixon v. Condon (1932), again citing the "equal protection" clause, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the statute and the executive committee resolution banning African American participation in the Democratic primary. In response the Texas Democratic state convention adopted a resolution banning African Americans from participating in the Party's primary. Against the advice of the NAACP private citizens in Houston promptly challenged the resolution in court. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935) the Supreme Court unanimously decided that the Democratic Party was a private organization whose state convention could determine membership qualifications. Later, these same Houstonians – this time working together with the NAACP – fought back, bringing the case of Lonnie E. Smith, a Houston dentist, to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), eight justices on a Supreme Court with several new members overturned the Grovey decision. The majority concluded that several state laws made the Texas primary more than just a function of a private organization. Instead, these laws made it an integral component of the electoral process. As a consequence, the court ruled, it was unconstitutional to prohibit African Americans from voting in the Democratic primary, including votes for party officials. Smith v. Allwright did not prevent other attempts to disenfranchise African Americans. But it effectively ended the white primary in Texas, a major step along the path to securing equal voting rights. Following Reconstruction, White political leaders in Texas and other southern states sought to take the vote from Black voters. As a disenfranchisement device, the poll tax discouraged poor Whites as well as Blacks from voting, while enabling Blacks who paid the tax to vote. Party rules or state laws that barred Blacks from the Democratic primary, however, could
virtually disenfranchise all Blacks (and only Blacks) by keeping them out of the election that generally determined who would hold office in a Democratic-dominated state. When the Texas legislature passed a White primary law in 1923, it thrust Texans and the Texas White primary into the center of a struggle to have the United States Supreme Court declare all White primaries unconstitutional. In the years immediately following Reconstruction no statewide primaries existed, and virtually all
politically involved Texas Blacks were Republicans. Especially in East Texas counties with Black majorities, Blacks often did participate in local politics. The first attempt to end local Republican rule where Blacks had a decided majority was in Harrison County, where the so-called Citizen's Party, formed in 1878, managed
to upset the county Republicans by stuffing ballot boxes and using intimidation. Similar efforts and occurrences took place in many other counties in the 1870s and 1880s, including Leon, Montgomery, Colorado, DeWitt, Fort Bend, Waller, Wharton, and other counties. When third-party movements, such as the People's party of the 1890s, appealed to Black Texans as well as to some White Democrats, Black voters also
influenced state elections. Even some Democratic candidates sought Black votes in response to the Populist challenge. The Populists soon faded as a significant force, but White leaders began to search for ways of assuring White unity and hegemony. Governor James S. Hogg and state representative Alexander W. Terrell
supported legislation to require and regulate primaries. They wished to counter vote fraud and believed that Blacks should be excluded from Democratic primaries. Terrell's primary legislation was passed in 1903 and amended frequently thereafter. Some local party leaders adopted rules barring Blacks from participating in the primary, but the law was not universally successful in disenfranchising Blacks throughout Texas. When more and more Anglo farmers moved into South Texas, conflict with
established Mexican-American ranchers ensued as the two groups struggled for political and economic control of the region. The new farmers sought to eliminate Mexican Texans, who generally supported the old ranchers through the patron system, from the political process. In addition to using the formal and informal devices associated with the White Primary in the rest of Texas, organizations such as Dimmit County's White Man's Primary Association, established in 1914, disfranchised
Mexican Americans in local elections and controlled the local labor supply. In 1923, however, the legislature passed a law explicitly barring Blacks from voting in Democratic primaries. A 1921 decision in a case (Newberry v. United States) not related to White primaries had signaled the United States Supreme Court's willingness to treat primaries as private party functions. Texas legislators
apparently concluded that the courts would not provide constitutional protection to Blacks who wished to vote in primaries. In 1924 Lawrence A. Nixon, a Black physician and member of the El Paso chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, challenged the new law. With financial and legal help
from the local and national NAACP, Nixon's suit reached the Supreme Court as Nixon v. Herndon. On March 7, 1927, the court unanimously declared the White primary statute unconstitutional for violating the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision, however, left open the possibility that the party could do privately what the state could not do officially. White Texas Democrats took only a few months to respond to this opportunity to restore the White primary.
The legislature replaced the 1923 law with a new statute giving the executive committee of each state party power to decide who could vote in its primary. The Democratic executive committee adopted a resolution allowing only Whites to vote in the Democratic primary. Nixon again sued and again won a temporary victory. The United States Supreme Court decided Nixon v. Condon by a five-to-four vote announced on May 2, 1932. The majority opinion concluded that the Democratic executive
committee would not have had the authority to speak for the party in banning Blacks without the 1927 law that granted it that authority. Because of this indirect state role, the White primary had violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Just weeks after the second Nixon decision, the Texas Democratic state convention adopted its own White primary resolution to replace the executive committee's resolution. In 1934 Texas attorney general
James Allred issued an official opinion endorsing the legitimacy of the convention's action. Allred was running in the Democratic gubernatorial primary and expected the Black vote to go against him. Many White leaders welcomed Allred's overt support for the White primary, but others attacked him. Black opponents of the White primary also faced disunity. Houston barber Richard R. Grovey and attorneys J. Alston Atkins and Carter W. Wesley initiated their own challenge to the White primary despite the tactical objections of the NAACP. The Houstonians generated some support for their cause but lost their case, Grovey v. Townsend. On April 1, 1935, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that the Democratic party was a private organization whose state convention could determine membership qualifications. Thus, Blacks had no constitutionally protected right to vote in the Democratic primary. Some of the Houston Blacks who had split with the NAACP over Grovey later cooperated with the NAACP to bring the case of Lonnie E. Smith, a Houston dentist, to the Supreme Court. By this time the membership of the court had changed, and the nation's fight against Nazism in Europe was indirectly strengthening support for civil rights at home. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), eight justices overturned the Grovey decision. The majority concluded that various state laws made the Texas primary an integral part of the general electoral process. Therefore, Blacks could not constitutionally be prohibited from voting in the Democratic primary even by party officials. The Smith decision did not end all attempts to limit Black political participation but did virtually end the White primary in Texas. The number of African Americans registered to vote in Texas increased from 30,000 in 1940 to 100,000 in 1947. With the help of the NAACP, the state's relatively well-organized Black population had won a significant victory. Is history important to you?We need your support because we are a non-profit organization that relies upon contributions from our community in order to record and preserve the history of our state. Every dollar helps.
Evan Anders, "Boss Rule and Constituent Interests: South Texas Politics during the Progressive Era," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 84 (January 1981). Alwyn Barr, Reconstruction to Reform: Texas Politics, 1876–1906 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971). Darlene Clark Hine, Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas (Millwood, New York: KTO Press, 1979). David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987). The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry. Sanford N. Greenberg, “White Primary,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed December 25, 2022, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/white-primary. Published by the Texas State Historical Association. TID: Original Publication Date: February 1, 1996 Most Recent Revision Date: September 29, 2020 This entry belongs to the following Handbook Special Projects:
 Which of the following is true of the initiation of the white primary system in 1903 quizlet?Which of the following is true of the initiation of the white primary system in 1903? The one-party Democratic Party rule at the time made it even more devastating to African American voter participation.
What was the white primary quizlet?A state primary election that restricts voting to whites only; outlawed by the Supreme Court in 1944. A device used by Southern states to disenfranchise African Americans. It restricted voting to those whose grandfathers had voted before 1867.
What was the main purpose of the white primary?To strengthen the exclusion of minorities from the political system, Texas, Georgia and some other states established white primaries, a “selectively inclusive” system that permitted only whites to vote in the primaries.
What was the purpose of the white primary in Texas quizlet?Terms in this set (15)
How did the white primary system in Texas effectively exclude African Americans from the political process? It prohibited African Americans from participating in Democratic primary elections, which always chose the winning candidate.
|
Which of the following is true of the initiation of the white primary system in 1903?
zusammenhängende Posts
Urheberrechte © © 2024 de.ketajaman Inc.
