Wilford Horace Smith (April 1863 - June 9, 1926) was an American lawyer who specialized in constitutional law. He was the first African-American lawyer to win a case before the Supreme Court of the United States, Carter v. Texas. [1]
Historian R. Volney Smith called him "the best lawyer" arguing against southern laws disenfranchising African Americans in the Jim Crow era, "unassuming, ambitious, and brilliant." [2]
Smith was born in April 1863 in Mississippi. [3] His father was from Virginia and his mother from Kentucky. [4]
He attended Boston University School of Law and graduated in 1883. He married in 1895, and around the same year moved to Galveston, Texas to practice law. He moved to Manhattan, New York City by 1910. [5] He died on June 9, 1926, in Manhattan, New York City. [6]
James Kimble Vardaman was an American politician from the U.S. state of Mississippi. A Democrat, he served as the Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908 and then represented Mississippi in the United States Senate from 1913 to 1919.
A grandfather clause, also known as grandfather policy, grandfathering, or being grandfathered in, is a provision in which an old rule continues to apply to some existing situations while a new rule will apply to all future cases. Those exempt from the new rule are said to have grandfather rights or acquired rights, or to have been grandfathered in. Frequently, the exemption is limited, as it may extend for a set time, or it may be lost under certain circumstances; for example, a grandfathered power plant might be exempt from new, more restrictive pollution laws, but the exception may be revoked and the new rules would apply if the plant were expanded. Often, such a provision is used as a compromise or out of practicality, to allow new rules to be enacted without upsetting a well-established logistical or political situation. This extends the idea of a rule not being retroactively applied.
The Niagara Movement (NM) was a civil rights organization founded in 1905 by a group of activists—many of whom were among the vanguard of African-American lawyers in the United States—led by W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. The Niagara Movement was organized to oppose racial segregation and disenfranchisement. Its members felt "unmanly" the policy of accommodation and conciliation, without voting rights, promoted by Booker T. Washington. It was named for the "mighty current" of change the group wanted to effect and took Niagara Falls as its symbol. The group did not meet in Niagara Falls, New York, but planned its first conference for nearby Buffalo. The Niagara Movement was the immediate predecessor of the NAACP.
The civil rights movement (1896–1954) was a long, primarily nonviolent action to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. The era has had a lasting impact on American society – in its tactics, the increased social and legal acceptance of civil rights, and in its exposure of the prevalence and cost of racism.
Michael Hoke Smith was an American attorney, politician, and newspaper owner who served as United States secretary of the interior (1893–1896), 58th governor of Georgia, and a United States senator (1911–1920) from Georgia. He was a leader of the progressive movement in the South and in the successful campaign to disenfranchise African American voters in 1907.
The Jaybird–Woodpecker War (1888–89) was a feud between two United States Democratic Party factions fighting for political control of Fort Bend County, Texas, in the southeast part of the state. The Jay Bird Democratic Association was an all-White political organization formed in 1887 by young men to challenge and regain control of the county government from the biracial coalition of former White and Black Republicans who had dominated the county Democratic party and county government since 1869. Murders and political assassinations were committed against persons in each faction in 1888 and 1889.
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.
Henry Plummer Cheatham was an educator, farmer and politician, elected as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1889 to 1893 from North Carolina. He was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as disfranchisement reduced black voting. After that, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972 and none from North Carolina until 1992.
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.
Robert Bradley Hawley was a businessman and politician from Galveston, Texas, elected as a Republican U.S. Representative (1897–1901) from Texas's 10th congressional district. He won his office in 1896 and 1898 with a plurality, as white voters split between Democratic and Populist party candidates.
The Jim Crow laws were state and local laws introduced in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that enforced racial segregation, "Jim Crow" being a pejorative term for an African American. The last of the Jim Crow laws were overturned in 1965. Formal and informal racial segregation policies were present in other areas of the United States as well, even as several states outside the South had banned discrimination in public accommodations and voting. Southern laws were enacted by white-dominated state legislatures (Redeemers) to disenfranchise and remove political and economic gains made by African Americans during the Reconstruction era. Such continuing racial segregation was also supported by the successful Lily-white movement.
The civil rights movement (1865–1896) aimed to eliminate racial discrimination against African Americans, improve their educational and employment opportunities, and establish their electoral power, just after the abolition of slavery in the United States. The period from 1865 to 1895 saw a tremendous change in the fortunes of the Black community following the elimination of slavery in the South.
The Negro Problem is a collection of seven essays by prominent Black American writers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar, edited by Booker T. Washington, and published in 1903. It covers law, education, disenfranchisement, and Black Americans' place in American society.
Robert Heberton Terrell was an attorney and the second African American to serve as a justice of the peace in Washington, DC. In 1911 he was appointed as a judge to the District of Columbia Municipal Court by President William Howard Taft; he was one of four African-American men appointed to high office and considered his "Black Cabinet". He was reappointed as judge under succeeding administrations, including that of Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
The 1908 United States presidential election in Arkansas took place on November 3, 1908. All contemporary 46 states were part of the 1908 United States presidential election. Voters chose nine electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president.
Emanuel Molyneaux Hewlett was an American attorney, judge, and civil rights activist. He was among the first African Americans to be admitted to the bar of the United States Supreme Court, in 1883, and among the first to argue cases before the Supreme Court. He served as a Justice of the Peace in Washington, DC, from 1890 to 1906.
Herschel Vivian Cashin was an American lawyer, state legislator, and public official in the United States.
The National Independent Political League (NIPL) was an American political organization that sought racial and social justice in the early 20th century. Considered a militant group, NIPL was founded by William Monroe Trotter in 1908 as the NationalNegro American Political League and operated until around 1920 as the National Independent Equal Rights League. In contrast to its more successful contemporary, the NAACP, NIPL was led and funded by African Americans. Historian Mark Schneider notes that NIPL "foreshadowed the militant organizations of the 1950s and 1960s that bypassed the NAACP."
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