CONSTITUTIONAL VALIDITY OF STATUTE BARRING NEGROES FROM PRIMARY ELECTIONS

Authors

Abstract

The history of suffrage in the South during the last thirty-five years has been largely a story of the adoption and administration of discriminatory regulations devised to catch the negro without debarring any considerable number of white people. This legal disfranchisement has been accomplished by property or educational qualifications possessed generally by whites but not by negroes, or by giving a great deal of discretion to election and registration officials, who, understanding what is expected of them, find quite uniformly that the negroes do not meet the requirements while the white applicants generally do. How the letter of the Fifteenth Amendment is ingeniously observed, while the spirit of it is flagrantly violated is fully explained in "Negro Suffrage; The Constitutional Point of View," 1 AM. Por. Sci. Rev. 17. Suffice it to say that the statutes which have been held constitutional have not disqualified the negroes as such. The single exception is the recent, and probably the most efficient and boldly daring, deprivation of the political rights of negroes, the Texas statute of 1923, which provides: "All qualified voters under the laws and Constitution of the State of Texas who are bona fide members of the Democratic party, shall be eligible to participate in any Democratic party primary election, provided that such voter complies with all laws and rules governing party primary elections; however, in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic party primary election held in the state of Texas, and should a negro vote in a Democratic primary election, such ballot shall be void and election officials are herein directed to throw out such ballot and not count the same." Chandler v. Neff (D. C. Tex: 1924) 298 Fed. 515, was a suit by a negro voter to restrain the enforcement of the above statute on the ground that it violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The suit was dismissed on two grounds : (1) that an equity court is without jurisdiction to restrain enforcement of the statute, political rights not being within the cognizance of equity; (2) that a primary election is not an election and the right to vote therein is not protected by the Constitution.

Recommended Citation

CONSTITUTIONAL VALIDITY OF STATUTE BARRING NEGROES FROM PRIMARY ELECTIONS, 23 Mich. L. Rev. 279 (1925).
Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol23/iss3/8