Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73

Case citation

Case citation is the system used in many countries to identify the decisions in past court cases, either in special series of books called reporters or law reports, or in a 'neutral' form which will identify a decision wherever it was reported...

 (1932), was a voting rights case decided by the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Supreme Court

Supreme Court of the United States

The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...

, which found the all-white Democratic Party primary in Texas unconstitutional. This was one of four cases brought to challenge the Texas all-white Democratic Party primary. All challenges were supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...

 (NAACP).

Background

In Nixon v. Herndon

Nixon v. Herndon

Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 , was a United States Supreme Court decision in which the Court struck down a Texas law which forbade blacks from voting in the Texas Democratic primary. Because Texas was a one-party state, the Democratic Party primary was the only competitive process and chance to...

(1927), the Court had struck down

Judicial review

Judicial review is the doctrine under which legislative and executive actions are subject to review by the judiciary. Specific courts with judicial review power must annul the acts of the state when it finds them incompatible with a higher authority...

 a Texas

Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

 statute that prohibited blacks from participating in the Texas Democratic

Democratic Party (United States)

The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...

 primary election

Primary election

A primary election is an election in which party members or voters select candidates for a subsequent election. Primary elections are one means by which a political party nominates candidates for the next general election....

. Very shortly after that decision, the Texas Legislature

Texas Legislature

The Legislature of the state of Texas is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Texas. The legislature is a bicameral body composed of a 31-member Senate and a 150-member House of Representatives. The Legislature meets at the Capitol in Austin...

 repealed the invalidated statute, declared that the effect of the Nixon decision was to create an emergency requiring immediate action, and replaced the old statute with a new one. The new law provided that every political party would henceforth "in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party."

Under the authority of this law, the executive committee of the Texas Democratic Party adopted a resolution stating that "all white democrats who are qualified under the constitution and laws of Texas" would be allowed to vote. In the 1928 Democratic primary, Dr. L.A. Nixon of El Paso again tried to vote. He was again denied, on the ground that the resolution allowed only whites to vote (Nixon was black). Thereafter Nixon sued the judges of elections in federal court.

The Issue

The defendants argued that there was no state action and therefore no equal protection

Equal Protection Clause

The Equal Protection Clause, part of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides that "no state shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"...

 violation, because the Democratic Party was "merely a voluntary association" which had the power to choose its own membership.

The Decision

The Court, however, in a five to four ruling, reasoned that because the Texas statute gave the party's executive committee the authority to exclude would-be members of the party – an authority, the Court said, that the executive committee hitherto had not possessed – the executive committee was acting under a state grant of power. Because there was state action, the case was controlled by Nixon v. Herndon, which prohibited state officials from "discharg[ing] their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black."

Aftermath

The Court's decision affected all-white primaries in other Southern states.

The Democratic Party in Texas responded by barring blacks from participation in the party nominating conventions, and thus effectively continuing the white primary.

Grovey v. Townsend (1935) and Smith v. Allwright

Smith v. Allwright

Smith v. Allwright , 321 U.S. 649 , was a very important decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation. It overturned the Democratic Party's use of all-white primaries in Texas, and other states where the party used the...

(1944) were additional cases brought by African Americans to challenge Texas white primaries.