“We already had the Negro eliminated from politics by the white primary,” he proudly asserted.49 And then a paper-thin aura of legality was achieved because blacks were welcome to vote in the irrelevant and perfunctory general election. Except black people fought back. Over the span of twenty years they launched four separate lawsuits that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Texas was the site of this battle, because while all eleven states of the Old Confederacy had the white primary, the Lone Star State did it in “a more brutally direct fashion.”
