Can I read The Battle For The Black Ballot: Smith V. Allwright And The Defeat Of The Texas All White Primary (landmark Law Cases And American Society) on EtoBox?

The Battle For The Black Ballot: Smith V. Allwright And The Defeat Of The Texas All White Primary (landmark Law Cases And American Society) by Charles L. Zelden is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Battle For The Black Ballot: Smith V. Allwright And The Defeat Of The Texas All White Primary (landmark Law Cases And American Society) about?

The history of voting rights in America is a checkerboard marked by dogged progress against persistent prejudice toward an expanding inclusiveness. The Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Allwright is a crucial chapter in that broader story and marked a major turning point for the modern civil rights movement. Charles Zelden's concise and thoughtful retelling of this episode reveals why.Denied membership in the Texas Democratic Party by popular consensus, party rules, and (from 1923 to 1927) state statutes, Texas Black people were routinely turned away from voting in the Democratic primary in the first decades of the twentieth century. Given that Texas was a one-party state and that the primary effectively determined who held office, this meant the total exclusion of Texas blacks from the political process. This practice went unchecked until 1940, when Lonnie Smith, a Black dentist from Houston, fought his exclusion by election judge S. E. Allwright in the 1940 Democratic Primary. Defeated in the lower courts, Smith finally found justice in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 that the Democratic Party and its primary were not “private and voluntary” and, thus, were duly bound by

Author

Charles L. Zelden

Publisher

Lawrence, Ka.: University Press of Kansas

Published

2024

Language

EN

ISBN

9780700613397

Subjects

Law, History, Political Science