*On this date in 1932, Nixon v. Condon was decided. This voting rights case was decided by the United States Supreme Court, which found the all-white Democratic Party primary in Texas unconstitutional. Nixon v. Condon was one of four cases brought to challenge the Texas all-white Democratic Party primary.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) supported all challenges. With Smith v. Allwright (1944), the Supreme Court decisively prohibited the white primary. In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the Court struck down a Texas statute banning blacks from participating in the Texas Democratic primary election. Shortly after that decision, the Texas Legislature repealed the invalidated ordinance, declared that the Nixon decision created an emergency requiring immediate action, and replaced the old statute with a new one.
The new law provided that every political party would "determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party." Under the authority of this law, the executive committee of the Texas Democratic Party adopted a resolution stating that "all white democrats who are qualified under the constitution and laws of Texas" would be allowed to vote. In the 1928 Democratic primary, Dr. L. A. Nixon of El Paso again tried to vote. He was again denied because the resolution permitted only whites to vote (Nixon was black). Nixon sued the judges of elections in the Federal Court.
The defendants argued that there was no state action or equal protection violation because the Democratic Party was "merely a voluntary association" with the power to choose its members. In a five-to-four ruling, the Court reasoned that the Texas statute gave the party's executive committee the authority to exclude would-be members.
The Court said that the executive committee hitherto had not possessed – the executive committee was acting under a state grant of power. Because there was state action, the case was controlled by Nixon v. Herndon (1927). It prohibited state officials from "discharging their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black."
