With no federal interference and a one-party system, the white primary became a masterful way to “emasculate politically the entire body of Negro voters,” wrote Leo Alilunas in his 1940s article “The Rise of the ‘White Primary’ Movement as a Means of Barring the Negro from the Polls.” Come the general election, blacks who defied other methods of disenfranchisement, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, could vote if they wished—in what was by then an irrelevant and perfunctory election. Except black people fought back.
