RACE RELATIONS: DENYING BLACK SUFFRAGE

The Rise of the Southern All-White Primary

In 1923 the Texas General Assembly enacted a statute that barred all "persons of color" from voting in state Democratic Party primaries. On 26 July 1924 in El Paso, Dr. L. A. Nixon, a black dentist, attempted to vote in the Democratic primary as he had done in the past. Nixon had paid the required annual poll tax, but Charles Herndon, the judge of elections for Precinct 9, refused to issue him a ballot.

A Legal Challenge to the Whites-Only Primary

At the urging of the El Paso branch of the NAACP, Nixon filed a lawsuit against Herndon. Claiming that his constitutional right to vote—as guaranteed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ~~~ had been violated and that he had been denied his franchise on the basis of race, he sought $5,000 in punitive damages from Herndon and the state of Texas. In July 1925 the Federal District Court for West Texas dismissed Nixon's case, but the U.S. Supreme Case later accepted it on the basis of writ of error. Members of Nixon's legal team—including Moorfield Storey, the national secretary of the NAACP, and Louis Marshall and James A. Cobb, attorneys who had represented the NAACP in similar civil rights challenges—argued the case before the Supreme Court on 4 January 1927, Attorney General Daniel Moody of Texas sought special permission to file a brief of rebuttal and was given thirty days to submit this document.

A Limited Victory

On 7 March the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Nixon. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who read the opinion for the seven-judge majority, declared that the Texas primary statute was a "direct and obvious infringement of the Fifteenth Amendment." The legislature had framed the measure specifically to deny franchise to a "bloc of potential electors on the grounds of color alone." Because Nixon had sought only a damage settlement, the Texas primary law was not abrogated by the Supreme Court decision, but the case set a precedent for a litigation in the 1940s that did formally challenge the constitutionality of the whites-only southern primary.