The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disenfranchisement of African Americans in state primary elections was unconstitutional. Although a significant victory for civil rights, the decision did not end attempts by Texans to disenfranchise African American voters, especially in county elections.
In 1923, the Texas legislature sought to disenfranchise African American voters in the state by passing a resolution that “in no event shall a Negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary. . . .” Since the 1890’s, in Texas as in all other Southern states, nomination in the Democratic
Almost immediately after the Texas legislature barred African Americans from participating in the Democratic primary, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The Texas legislature reacted defiantly to the Supreme Court decision. On June 7, 1927, the legislature passed a new resolution granting to the state executive committees of every political party the authority to establish the qualifications of their members and to determine who was qualified to vote or otherwise participate in the party. In turn, the Democratic Party State Executive Committee
Once again Nixon filed suit, this time against James Condon, the election officer who refused to give him a ballot in the 1928 Democratic primary. In Nixon v. Condon
The Democratic Party State Executive Committee immediately rescinded its resolution prohibiting African Americans from voting in its primary, but the state party convention voted to limit participation in its deliberations to whites, and Nixon and the NAACP, after two Supreme Court cases and an expenditure of six thousand dollars, were once more back at the beginning. In July, 1934, Richard Randolph Grovey in Houston, Texas, was refused a ballot to vote in the Democratic primary. On April 1, 1935, in Grovey v. Townsend,
There the matter rested. The primary was held not to be part of the general election, so there was presumably no relationship to the Fifteenth Amendment’s protection of suffrage. Because the Democratic Party was a private organization, it was free to establish membership qualifications, and there was not sufficient state involvement to invoke the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment.
It seemed there was no way to contest the validity of the Texas white primary. In 1941, however, in United States v. Classic,
United States v. Classic dealt with a Louisiana primary in which there had been fraudulent returns, but otherwise there was no way to distinguish the Texas primary from the one held in the neighboring Southern state. In Texas, as in Louisiana, in 1941 as in 1923, Democratic Party nomination was a virtual guarantee of election, and the general election was a mere formality. The NAACP took immediate advantage of the ruling: Lonnie E. Smith, a Houston dentist and NAACP member, sued a Texas election official for five thousand dollars for refusing to give him a ballot to vote in the 1940 Democratic congressional primaries. The NAACP’s legal counsel, Thurgood Marshall, and William Henry Hastie, dean of the Howard Law School, brought Smith v. Allwright to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In April, 1944, mindful of Southern sensibilities but intent upon overruling the nine-year-old precedent in Grovey, the Court chose Stanley Reed, a Democrat from Kentucky, to write its opinion. Justice Reed’s opinion made it clear that the Court, except for Justice Roberts (the author of the Grovey decision), had concluded that the primary was an integral part of a general election, particularly in the Southern states. The Classic decision, wrote Justice Reed, raised the issue of whether excluding African Americans from participation in the Democratic Party primary in Texas violated the Fifteenth Amendment. The answer was in the affirmative, and Grovey v. Townsend was expressly overruled.
The long litigative battle against the Texas white primary seemed to be over—but it was not. In Fort Bend County, Texas, the Jaybird Democratic Party
It took twenty-one years for the United States Supreme Court to rule that the Texas white primary violated the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. It would take another twenty-one years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally secured the ballot for African Americans in the South. In the interim, the fall of the white primary had the practical effect of increasing African American registrants in the Southern states from approximately 250,000 in 1940 to 775,000 seven years later. African Americans were still intimidated and defrauded of their suffrage rights, but Smith v. Allwright was an important landmark on the road to uninhibited enfranchisement. It also was a symbol that the Supreme Court would examine the reality behind the subterfuge engaged in by anti-suffrage lawmakers and act to protect African Americans in the enjoyment of their civil rights.
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Fassett, John D. New Deal Justice: The Life of Stanley Reed of Kentucky. New York: Vantage Press, 1994. A biography of the conservative Democratic justice who wrote the majority opinion in Smith v. Allwright. -
Hine, Darlene Clark. Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas. Millwood, N.Y.: KTO Press, 1979. An examination of the background of the white primary and the struggle to bring about its demise. -
Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of “Brown v. Board of Education” and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976. An eminently readable analysis of another landmark Supreme Court case in African American history. -
Lawson, Steven F. Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944-1969. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. Traces the development of African American enfranchisement from Smith v. Allwright to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its aftermath. Includes a chapter on the white primary. -
Powledge, Fred. Free at Last: The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. A popular account of the struggle for equality during the 1960’s, with numerous human interest stories. -
Zelden, Charles L. The Battle for the Black Ballot: “Smith v. Allwright” and the Defeat of the Texas All-White Primary. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Book-length study of the case, its intricacies, and its consequences. Bibliographic references and index.
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