Smith v. Allwright

In the years immediately following the Civil War, newly freed African Americans wielded immense political power in the southern United States, where they constituted a majority of the population. Southern whites saw this new political situation as intolerable, and contrived means to suppress the new voting majority.

No tactics of suppression were deemed beyond consideration. Vigilante bands such as the Ku Klux Klan and official institutions, including local police forces, combined to terrorize African Americans attempting to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Less crude, but more insidious, were legal and procedural methods of excluding African Americans from participation in the political system.

One such method was the establishment of a virtually one party system in state politics. Throughout the southern United States the Democratic Party (the party that opposed Lincoln within the Union) came to dominate the political scene. As such, Democratic primary elections were tantamount to general elections. With a one party system in place many Southern states then legally excluded African Americans from participation in the Democratic Party, rendering them politically impotent. This tactic was initially successful because the Supreme Court refused to consider cases involving primary elections. In Newberry v. United States (1921), the Court ruled that, since primary elections were unknown to the framers of the Constitution, their operation was outside the jurisdiction of the federal judiciary. This attitude did not last for long, however. Six years later a Texas state law barring African Americans from participation in Democratic Party primary elections was successfully challenged in Nixon v. Herndon (1927), with the Court ruling that the law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Following this decision the Texas legislature created a Democratic Party Executive Committee and authorized it to exclude African Americans from its primaries. Once again, in Nixon v. Condon (1932), the Court held that the legislature's authorization constituted unconstitutional state action since the executive committee was a state creation, and thus, in effect, a public institution. The Texas Democratic Party responded by holding a convention at which delegates voted to exclude African Americans from participating in party primaries.

This latest tactic of the Texas Democratic Party was immediately challenged in Grovey v. Townsend. R. R. Grovey, an African American resident of Houston, Texas, brought suit against the state Democratic Party for its refusal to provide him with a primary ballot. The Supreme Court, however, sided with the party on this occasion, ruling that since the party delegates had voted to exclude African Americans without state interference, their actions were beyond federal jurisdiction.