The Texas Legislature passed a law in 1923 that prevented black voters from participating in any Democratic Party primary election.
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.
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.
Following the temporary loss of power to the biracial coalition of Populists and Republicans in the 1890s, when Democrats regained control of state legislatures (often on campaigns based on white supremacy), they systematically adopted electoral rules in new constitutions or specific laws to disenfranchise black voters by making voter registration and voting more difficult.
The Democrats sometimes protected illiterate or poor white voters by such devices as grandfather clauses, which provided exemptions to men who had ancestors who have voted or resided in certain areas as of a date that excluded blacks.
Beginning in the early 20th century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed numerous lawsuits in efforts to overturn discriminatory electoral and voter registration practices by Southern states.
[12] Following the ruling, Texas amended the statute to allow the Democratic Party's state executive committee to set voting qualifications for its primaries.
This revised scheme was upheld in Grovey v. Townsend (1935), where the Supreme Court held that this basis for a white primary was constitutional,[15] on the grounds that the political party was a private entity.
[16][full citation needed] Though Smith v. Allwright applied directly only to the Texas law, following this ruling, most southern states ended their selectively inclusive white primaries.
In his 1946 senate reelection campaign, Mississippi politician and Klansman Theodore Bilbo predicted that there would be a surge of voting from black people, and vowed to help combat it.
In some cases activists were assaulted or murdered, and African Americans made little progress against white determination to exclude most blacks from voting.
Blacks were still systematically excluded by discriminatory provisions from registering and voting in the primaries, and participating in the precinct and county caucuses and the state convention.
[19] In all, 43 of the 53 members of the Alabama delegation ... refused to pledge their support for the national ticket of Johnson and Hubert Humphrey and were denied seating.
By this time, nearly 6.5 million African Americans had left the South in the Great Migration to escape its oppression and seek work opportunities in the North, Midwest and West, changing the demographics of numerous cities and regions.