White primaries

White primaries were primary elections held in the Southern states of the United States of America in which only white voters were permitted to participate. White primaries were established by the state Democratic Party units or by state legislatures in many Southern states after 1890. The white primary was one method used by white Democrats to disenfranchise most black and other minority voters. They also passed laws and constitutions with provisions to raise barriers to voter registration, completing disenfranchisement from 1890 to 1908 in all states of the former Confederacy.

The Texas legislature passed a law in 1923 that delegated authority to state conventions of political parties to make rules for their primaries. The Democratic Party banned black and Mexican-American minorities from participating in their party primaries. This was the dominant party in Southern states, effectively holding the only competitive contests. The United States Supreme Court heard three Texas cases related to white primaries in 1927, 1932, and 1935. In the 1927 and 1932 Texas white primary cases, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, saying that state laws related to establishing a white primary violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Texas changed its law in response, delegating authority to the political parties to establish their own conditions for primaries. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the Supreme Court ruled that the practice was constitutional, as it was administered by the Democratic Party, which was a private, not a state institution.

In 1944, the Supreme Court case ruled 8-1 against the Texas white primary system in Smith v. Allwright. In Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court ruled on a challenge to the 1923 Texas state law. It ruled that the law violated the protections of the Constitution because the state allowed a discriminatory rule to be established by the Democratic Party. After the case, most Southern states ended their selectively inclusive white primaries. They retained other devices of disenfranchisement, particularly in terms of barriers to voter registration, such as poll taxes and literacy tests. These generally survived legal challenges as they applied to all potential voters. But in practice they were administered in a discriminatory manner by white officials that resulted in most blacks being excluded from the political system in the South until after the 1960s, no matter their level of education or property ownership.

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