Texas was, however, undaunted. Satisfied that the court hadn’t questioned whether the white primary actually violated the Fifteenth Amendment right to vote, the legislature simply redrafted the statute to turn the Democratic Party into a private organization—one to which the state just happened to delegate the authority to hold a primary. The point of this ruse was perfectly clear. In the Cruikshank decision, almost fifty years earlier in 1875, the U.S. Supreme Court had established that private actors were “immune from the strictures of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.”53 Again,
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