White primary

White primaries were primary elections held in the Southern United States in which only white voters were permitted to participate. Statewide white primaries were established by the state Democratic Party units or by state legislatures in South Carolina (1896),^[1] Florida (1902),^[2] Mississippi and Alabama (also 1902), Texas (1905),^[3] Louisiana^[1] and Arkansas (1906),^[4] and Georgia (1900).^[5] Since winning the Democratic primary in the South at the time almost always meant winning the general election, barring black and other minority voters meant they were in essence disenfranchised. Southern states 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 prevented black voters from participating in any Democratic Party primary election. The Supreme Court, in 1927, 1932, and 1935, heard three Texas cases related to white primaries. In the 1927 and 1932 cases, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, saying that state laws establishing a white primary violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Later in 1927 Texas changed its law in response,^[6] delegating authority to political parties to establish their own rules for primaries. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935), the Supreme Court ruled that this practice was constitutional, as it was administered by the Democratic Party, which legally was a private institution, not a state institution.

In 1944, however, in Smith v. Allwright, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 against the Texas white primary system.^[7] In that case, the Court ruled that the 1923 Texas state law was unconstitutional, because it allowed the state Democratic Party to racially discriminate. After the case, most Southern states ended their selectively inclusive white primaries. They retained other techniques 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. Although the proportion of Southern blacks registered to vote steadily increased from less than 3% in 1940 to 29% in 1960 and over 40% in 1964,^[8] gains were minimal in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana outside Acadiana, and southern parts of Georgia.^[9] The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was intended to address this.