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The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the federal government and each state from denying or abridging a citizen's right to vote "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments.
The Twenty-fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits both Congress and the states from requiring the payment of a poll tax or any other tax to vote in federal elections. The amendment was proposed by Congress to the states on August 27, 1962, and was ratified by the states on January 23, 1964.
Voting rights, specifically enfranchisement and disenfranchisement of different groups, have been a moral and political issue throughout United States history.
Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation. It overturned the Texas state law that authorized parties to set their internal rules, including the use of white primaries. The court ruled that it was unconstitutional for the state to delegate its authority over elections to parties in order to allow discrimination to be practiced. This ruling affected all other states where the party used the white primary rule.
The Constitution of Mississippi is the primary organizing law for the U.S. state of Mississippi delineating the duties, powers, structures, and functions of the state government. Mississippi's original constitution was adopted at a constitutional convention held at Washington, Mississippi in advance of the western portion of the territory's admission to the Union in 1817. The current state constitution was adopted in 1890 following the reconstruction period. It has been amended and updated 100 times in since its adoption in 1890, with some sections being changed or repealed altogether. The most recent modification to the constitution occurred in November 2020, when Section 140 was amended, and Sections 141-143 were repealed.
Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), is a United States Supreme Court case that reviewed provisions of the 1890 Mississippi constitution and its statutes that set requirements for voter registration, including poll tax, literacy tests, the grandfather clause, and the requirement that only registered voters could serve on juries. The plaintiff, Henry Williams, claimed that Mississippi's voting laws were upheld with the intent to disenfranchise African Americans, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court did not find discrimination in the state's laws because, even though the laws made discrimination possible, the laws themselves did not discriminate against African Americans. The court found that any discrimination toward African Americans was performed by the administrative officers enforcing the law and that there was no judicial remedy for this kind of discrimination.
Harry McLeary Wurzbach was an American attorney and politician. He was the first Republican elected to the United States House of Representatives from Texas since Reconstruction to be elected for more than two terms and was re-elected to the Sixty-eighth, Sixty-ninth, and Seventieth congresses, representing Texas's 14th congressional district for several terms, from 1921 to 1929. He was re-elected in 1930 to the Seventy-second Congress and died in office. The first Republican elected from Texas who was born in the state, he was the only Republican from Texas serving in Congress during this period.
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), Florida (1902), Mississippi and Alabama, Texas (1905), Louisiana and Arkansas (1906), and Georgia (1900). 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.
Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U.S. 536 (1927), was a United States Supreme Court decision which struck down a 1923 Texas law forbidding blacks from voting in the Texas Democratic Party primary. Due to the limited amount of Republican Party activity in Texas at the time following the suppression of black voting through poll taxes, the Democratic Party primary was essentially the only competitive process and chance to choose candidates for the Senate, House of Representatives and state offices.
Disfranchisement after the Reconstruction era in the United States, especially in the Southern United States, was based on a series of laws, new constitutions, and practices in the South that were deliberately used to prevent black citizens from registering to vote and voting. These measures were enacted by the former Confederate states at the turn of the 20th century. Efforts were also made in Maryland, Kentucky, and Oklahoma. Their actions were designed to thwart the objective of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, which prohibited states from depriving voters of their voting rights based on race. The laws were frequently written in ways to be ostensibly non-racial on paper, but were implemented in ways that selectively suppressed black voters apart from other voters.
Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932), was a voting rights case decided by the United States Supreme Court, 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 (NAACP). With Smith v. Allwright (1944) the Supreme Court decisively prohibited the white primary.
Elections in Alabama are authorized under the Alabama State Constitution, which establishes elections for the state level officers, cabinet, and legislature, and the election of county-level officers, including members of school boards.
Terry v. Adams, 345 U.S. 461 (1953), was a United States Supreme Court decision that held white-only pre-primary elections to be unconstitutional. It was the last in a series of court cases addressing the system of white primaries designed to disenfranchise African-American voters in the southern United States.
Voter suppression in the United States consists of various legal and illegal efforts to prevent eligible citizens from exercising their right to vote. Such voter suppression efforts vary by state, local government, precinct, and election. Voter suppression has historically been used for racial, economic, gender, age and disability discrimination. After the American Civil War, all African-American men were granted voting rights, but poll taxes or language tests were used to limit and suppress the ability to register or cast a ballot. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 improved voting access. Since the beginning of voter suppression efforts, proponents of these laws have cited concerns over electoral integrity as a justification for various restrictions and requirements, while opponents argue that these constitute bad faith given the lack of voter fraud evidence in the United States.
This is a timeline of voting rights in the United States, documenting when various groups in the country gained the right to vote or were disenfranchised.
The 1920 presidential election in Texas was part of the 1920 United States presidential election in which all contemporary forty-eight states voted on November 2, 1920. State voters chose 20 electors, or representatives to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
The 1924 United States presidential election in Texas took place on November 4, 1924, as part of the 1924 United States presidential election. State voters chose 20 representatives, or electors, to the Electoral College, who voted for president and vice president.
African Americans were fully enfranchised in practice throughout the United States by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Prior to the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, some Black people in the United States had the right to vote, but this right was often abridged or taken away. After 1870, Black people were theoretically equal before the law, but in the period between the end of Reconstruction era and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 this was frequently infringed in practice.
The women's poll tax repeal movement was a movement in the United States, predominantly led by women, that attempted to secure the abolition of poll taxes as a prerequisite for voting in the Southern states. The movement began shortly after the ratification in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which granted suffrage to women. Before obtaining the right to vote, women were not obliged to pay the tax, but shortly after the Nineteenth Amendment became law, Southern states began examining how poll tax statutes could be applied to women. For example, North and South Carolina exempted women from payment of the tax, while Georgia did not require women to pay it unless they registered to vote. In other Southern states, the tax was due cumulatively for each year someone had been eligible to vote.
Lawrence Aaron Nixon was a medical doctor in El Paso, Texas who twice fought state election laws barring African-Americans from voting in Democratic Party primaries in Texas all the way to the United States Supreme Court. He was never allowed to join the El Paso Medical Society because of his African-American heritage.
References
- ↑ Eichelberger, Erika. "Texas just won the right to disenfranchise 600,000 people. It's not the first time".
- 1 2 Weeks, O. Douglas. "Election Laws". Texas State Historical Association. Retrieved 2021-08-01.
- 1 2 Hainsworth, Robert Wendell (1933). "The Negro and the Texas Primaries". The Journal of Negro History. 18 (4): 426–450. doi:10.2307/2714304. JSTOR 2714304. S2CID 149574925.
- ↑ Terrell, Alexander Watkins. "A Guide to the Alexander Watkins Terrell Papers, 1877–1912". Texas Archival Resources Online.