That was too explicit even for a US Supreme Court that had previously decided that the poll tax and the literacy test were constitutional in an 1898 decision in the case Williams v. Mississippi. After reviewing Texas’s white primary law, and seeing such an explicit violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause, the court was unanimous and unequivocal: “It seems to us hard to imagine a more direct and obvious infringement of the Fourteenth Amendment,” said Justice Oliver W. Holmes Jr., delivering the High Court’s decision in the case Nixon v. Herndon, a case decided in March
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