Nixon v. Herndon
The Court struck down a Texas law that flatly barred Black citizens from voting in Democratic primary elections, ruling that the law violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal treatment under the law.
The decision established that racial exclusion from primary elections is unconstitutional, an early step in a series of cases confronting the 'white primary' system used across the South to keep Black voters out of the political process.
“it is too clear for extended argument that color cannot be made the basis of a statutory classification affecting the right set up in this case”
The Court's core conclusion that race cannot be used to bar someone from voting in a primary.
How it got here: A federal trial court dismissed the suit for lack of jurisdiction over a political matter, and the voter took the case directly to the Supreme Court by writ of error.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A Black resident of El Paso, Texas, and a member of the Democratic Party, tried to vote in a 1924 Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, Congress, and state offices. Election judges turned him away under a 1923 Texas law that flatly declared no Black person eligible to vote in a Democratic primary. He sued the election judges for $5,000 in damages.
The question before the Court
Could Texas bar a Black voter from taking part in a Democratic Party primary election simply because of his race?
Why it matters
Black voters in Texas gained a legal path to challenge exclusion from primary elections, which often determined the real outcome of races in the one-party South. The ruling gave civil rights lawyers a foothold to keep attacking racially exclusionary voting practices in the years that followed.
What changes now
The Supreme Court's reversal ends this particular suit's dismissal and lets the voter's damages claim against the election judges go forward. The ruling struck down this specific Texas statute barring Black voters from Democratic primaries, though Texas and other Southern states would go on to try other legal workarounds to maintain all-white primaries, leading to further litigation in later years.
What this does not decide
The Court expressly avoided deciding whether the law also violated the Fifteenth Amendment, resolving the case solely on Fourteenth Amendment equal-protection grounds instead.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court rejected the argument that the case was purely political and therefore outside judicial power, explaining that a lawsuit over political conduct can still seek recovery for a private legal injury, a principle traced back over two centuries to an English case, Ashby v. White.
- Because private damage from being denied a vote at a final election has long supported a lawsuit, the Court reasoned the same logic covers being denied a vote at a primary election that effectively decides who wins office.
- Turning to the merits, the Court found it unnecessary to decide whether the law violated the Fifteenth Amendment (which bars racial discrimination in voting specifically) because the law so plainly violated the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee that states treat all citizens equally under the law.
- The Court explained that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted specifically to stop states from making laws that treat Black citizens worse than white citizens solely because of race.
- Applying that principle, the Court held that a law barring Black citizens from a primary election purely because of their color was exactly the kind of racial classification the Fourteenth Amendment forbids, since states may classify people for many purposes but may never do so by race alone in this context.