Negroes’ right to vote in state primaries upheld (4-3-44)

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 3, 1944)

Negroes’ right to vote in state primaries upheld

Supreme Court upsets 1935 ruling in 8–1 opinion involving Texas

Washington (UP) –
The Supreme Court ruled today, 8–1, that Negroes have a constitutional right to vote in state primary elections.

The court’s opinion was delivered by Justice Stanley Reed. Justice Owen J. Roberts dissented.

The ruling specifically involved the right of Negroes to vote in Texas Democratic primaries. Lonnie E. Smith, a Houston Negro, charged that the Democratic Party in Texas has been denying suffrage to Negroes in violation of the federal Constitution “solely because of race and color.”

The U.S. District Court in Houston rejected Smith’s arguments on the grounds that the Texas primaries were “political party affairs” and not subject to federal control. The Appeals Court in New Orleans also upheld the local election officials.

Justice Reed, in announcing today’s decision, said the court overruled its own previous doctrine – in 1935 – that the Democratic Party, as a private organization, had the right to make rules on who should vote in the Texas primaries. The state itself, the court held then, had made no law violating constitutional voting rights of Negroes.

Justice Reed said the court was not exercising its established power to reexamine constitutional questions “where correction depends upon amendment and not upon legislative action.”

Since its former decision, he said, the court has decided that primaries are a part of federal elections and therefore subject to federal control. This ruling was handed down in a Louisiana case.

Justice Roberts, in dissenting, said the ruling was another instance of a growing tendency on the court’s part to scrap previous rulings. He recalled that earlier this year he had expressed his views on the court’s willingness to “disregard and to overrule” former decisions.

He charged:

This tendency indicates an intolerance for what those who have composed this court in the past have conscientiously and deliberately concluded, and involves an assumption that knowledge and wisdom reside in us which was denied to our predecessors.

[grayknight1781]

Today, Texas is an open primary state where you can vote in any party’s primary, even if you are a Democratic, Republican, 3rd Party, or Independent. Although if there are run-off elections in the same cycle, you can’t then vote in a different party’s primary.

[NormanStewart]

The Pittsburgh Press (April 4, 1944)

Editorial: The Negro and the vote

The Supreme Court, reversing by 8–1 a decision of nine years ago, now holds that the Democratic Party of Texas cannot bar Negroes, if otherwise qualified, from voting in primaries.

In the earlier decision, now abandoned over the lone but biting dissent of Justice Roberts, the then conservative court had ruled (in Grovey v. Townsend) that to deny a vote in a primary was a mere refusal of party membership with which “the state need have no concern.”

In other words, the Democratic Party in Texas was in the nature of a private club, able like any club to limit its membership as it saw fit.

Now the 15th Amendment (1870) states:

The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The amendment doesn’t mention primaries. But, as everybody knows, in Texas as in other Southern states, the primary is usually the whole shooting match. The election is only a pro-forma ratification. Thus, exclusion from the primaries is actually exclusion from an effective vote.

Nevertheless, through various expedients – including the one sustained until yesterday by the Supreme Court – this exclusion has been successfully maintained.

The new ruling is a milestone in the long and arduous struggle to obtain for the Negro the civil rights accorded to him by the Constitution. He should exercise great vigilance – and temperateness – lest new expedients be devised to thwart this newly-won franchise.

[NormanStewart]

Roberts adds to his record as dissenter

Opposes granting Negro voting right

Washington (UP) –
Justice Owen J. Roberts, conservative Republican member of the Supreme Court, now ranks as the key figure in two of the greatest reversals in the high tribunal’s modern history.

He was the line dissenter yesterday when the court overruled its own decision of nine years ago and declared that Negroes have a constitutional right to vote in state primary elections. The opinion was written by Justice Stanley Reed.

Justice Roberts, reiterating criticism voiced earlier this year, charged that the court was breeding fresh doubt and confusion in the public mind by its about-face tactics.

Has changed own views

Observers recalled, however, that it was Justice Roberts who in 1937 changed his mind on minimum wage legislation for women and thereby permitted the court to reverse an earlier ruling holding the New York Minimum Wage Act unconstitutional.

That reversal, which came during the famous Supreme Court reorganization fight, has been hailed since as the turning point of President Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of many of his New Deal programs and policies.

Wage ruling reversed

The minimum wage law for women was originally rejected by the court in a 5–4 verdict in June 1936, but nine months later, it reversed this decision in upholding a Washington minimum wage statute. The split again was 5–4, on the basis of a change of viewpoint by Justice Roberts.

Thereafter, the tribunal held constitutional such programs of social and economic significance as the Railway Labor Act, the National Labor Relations Act, Social Security Act and the powers of the Securities and Exchange Commission – important phases of the New Deal program.

Stone changes mind

The court’s ruling yesterday was considered one of the tribunal’s most important stands in the field of civil liberties in the past decade. Justice Reed’s 8–1 majority opinion reversed a unanimous decision written in 1935 by Justice Roberts in the case of Grovey v. Townsend.

Justice Roberts and Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone are the only men now on the court who were also members when the 1935 case was decided. Justice Roberts stuck to his guns, but the Chief Justice changed his mind and agreed with Justice Reed.

New curb sought by Southerners

Washington (UP) –
The Supreme Court ruling that Negroes may vote in state primary elections raised the possibility today that some Southern states may abandon the primary system and return to the convention method of selecting political candidates.

The prospect of such action was seen by at least two Southern Senators, one of whom said that any Negro attempting to attend a Democratic convention in the South “will be thrown out by the seat of his pants.”

Senator John H. Overton (D-LA) mentioned the possibility of abandoning primaries and predicted at the same time that Southern reaction to the court ruling would be averse to a fourth term for President Roosevelt.

Mr. Overton said:

The South at all costs will maintain the rule of white supremacy. The Negro can be kept from the polls by educational qualification tests. This decision will add greatly to the difficulties of advocates of a fourth term in securing the support of the South,

Texas case involved

Southerners generally denounced the decision, in which the high court ruled that when primaries become part of the machinery for choosing state or national officials, a Negro has a constitutional right to vote.

The case arose in Texas where, as in other Southern states, the Democratic primary usually decides the winner of the general election.

Southerners in Congress predicted their states would find some other way, such as conventions or education tests, to prevent Negroes from participating in their primaries.

‘An abiding faith’

Rep. Nat Patton (D-TX) said:

I have an abiding faith that the Negroes aren’t going to vote in the white man’s Democratic primary. Our Democratic people in Texas will find some way to work out a Democratic primary for white folks. The Negroes don’t want to vote in an election that is not for them.

The high court’s ruling was broad enough to cover all primaries in which state and national candidates are nominated, but J. Lon Duckworth, chairman of the Georgia State Democratic Executive Committee, said in Atlanta that it should not qualify Negroes to participate in the Georgia Democratic primary.

[nicholasrusson_58993]

@grayknight1781

Texas is an open primary state

I’m not an American, but this seems like a neat way for states where one party is in an effective supermajority position to rig their opponents’ candidacy either to ensure they run their preferred candidate against an extremist who has no real chance to win or to place an “acceptable” opponent who might win, but would still operate to the informal direction of the majority party instead.

[xfilesfc]

This all started, I think, with a law in 1942 (amended in March 15, 1944) to allow “federal voters” from overseas locations to vote as absentees, without ‘poll tax’ and other manufactured impediments. That is, any African-American, if registered (which could also be done ‘by mail’) and a resident, could vote as a ‘regular’ voter in their state’s elections.

This did not sit well with keep-them-down white supremacists in the South. Each state would now have to look up the race of each individual voter, rather than at the color of the voter’s skin when they walked into the polling place. In the event, over 4,000,000 overseas military personnel voted in the 1944 elections - including an overwhelming majority for FDR - which didn’t sit well with Southern obstructionists either. (It was known that all overseas voters would vote that way.)

By the way, the law (number 227) was NOT signed by FDR (but by law, he didn’t veto it, so it became law anyway). FDR, as usual, was making sure he couldn’t be pinned down one way or another.

It might seem that Southern Democrats were still Democrats and would support FDR. That wasn’t exactly the case. Southern Democrats had more influence in that party (and the Republicans, believe it or not, were more liberal on this issue) and so held their support for pretty much anything in exchange for their racial “policies”.

After Truman was elected, and was seen to be hell-bent on ending segregation (in the military, for a start), there was a short-lived “Dixiecrat” rebellion, which ended when Truman was elected anyway (it turned out that the “Dixiecrats” didn’t speak for many whites in the South.). But the Southern Democrat influence interfered with african-american civil rights right up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 (JFK, somehow today a ‘liberal icon’, was unwilling to even try to enact such a law, for fear of alienating Southern Democrats. LBJ, somehow today a ‘liberal demon’, went to the mat and got it done.)

The Texas Supreme Court Case was an attempt to keep the Feds from telling the Texas Democratic Party they could not vacate the rights of Blacks to vote in primaries – and then, since the ‘rights’ of the party (both parties, really) to block people who didn’t vote in primaries could be conjured, yet another disenfranchisement would have the power of (federal) law.

Don’t you like it when the answer is longer than the question?