But the Democrats of Texas were nothing if not tenacious in holding on to segregation. Soon after Condon, the Texas Democratic State Convention adopted a resolution banning African Americans from participating in the party’s primary. In the earlier cases, the petitioner had been Dr. L.A. Nixon of El Paso. This time Richard Randolph Grovey, a civil rights activist and owner of a successful barbershop who had promised “to use reason, the public press and the Courts to let the world see Texas Democracy as it really is,” challenged the new law. In Grovey v. Townsend (1937), the Court reversed its earlier decisions and declared the Texas Democratic Party a private organization able to establish its own membership rules. It is this decision that the court would overturn in 1944 in the most famous of the so-called “Texas Primary” cases, Smith v. Allwright. In recent decades, some historians have come to identify Allwright as being at least as significant as Brown v. Board of Education a decade later.
The best work on this particular topic comes from a paper published in the April 1978 Southwestern Historical Quarterly. At the time of the publication of “The Elusive Ballot: The Black Struggle Against the Texas Democratic White Primary, 1932-1945,” Darlene Clark Hine was an assistant professor at Purdue University. She would go on to a storied career as one of the most vital historians of the Civil Rights Movement, the politics of the South, and African American history.
But the story Hine tells so well may be part of a larger tale of backlash against civil rights, opposition to voting rights, and politically-motivated disfranchisement that endures to this day. In very real ways, the history of voting rights in Texas might be the story of the backlash against voting rights in Texas. This story is still playing out in the Supreme Court, the United States Congress, the Texas legislature, and in the public political dialogue.
The “Backlash Thesis” comes from the legal historian Michael Klarman, who in a 1994 article in the Journal of American History argued that to a significant extent the most vital aspect of the Brown decision came in the response to it. It was the backlash, the massive resistance, including an uptick in violence against Black southerners, that caused a political change in American society and fueled much of the wave of change that took place in the next decade and more. One need look no further than the manufactured but nonetheless very real crisis presented by the way conservatives have framed and attacked Critical Race Theory as a way to oppose anti-racist pedagogy in public schools.