The African Texans

Chapter 5. Voting, Desegregation, and Economic Opportunity in the Late Twentieth Century

Voting, Desegregation, Economic Opportunity ▼▼▼          Voting, Desegregation, and Economic Opportunity in the Late Twentieth Century AFRICAN AMERICANS living in Texas cities, with their stronger economic base, moved to the front in the struggle for civil and political rights in the United States from the s to the s. Once the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had been founded in , it expanded to create a Houston chapter by .By ,Texas towns supported thirty-one local chapters of the NAACP with seven thousand members.After a membershipdeclineinthelatesands,blackbusinessleaders in Dallas and Houston helped create the Texas State Conference of NAACP branches that grew to .Efforts of organizers such as Lulu White of Houston and Juanita Craft of Dallas made the Texas conference one of the largest in the United States during the s and s.1 The treatment of African Americans in the legal system though, needed many changes, as indicated in a  legal case regarding blacks serving on juries: In Harris County, where petitioner, a negro, was indicted and convicted of rape, negroes constitute over % of the population, and almost % of the poll-tax payers; a minimum of from three to six thousand of them measure up to the qualifications prescribed by African Texans ▼▼▼  Texas statutes for grand jury service. The court clerk, called as a state witness and testifying from court records covering the years  through , showed that only  of the  grand jurors who served during that period were negroes; that of  persons summoned for grand jury duty, only  were negroes; that of these , the names of  appeared as the last name on the  man jury list, the custom being to select the  man grand jury in the order that the names appeared on the list . . . It is the petitioner’s contention that his conviction was based on an indictment obtained in violation of the provision of the Fourteenth Amendment that“No state shall ...deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”And the contention that equal protection was denied him rests on a charge that Negroes were in  and long prior thereto intentionally and systematically excluded from grand jury service solely on account of their race and color. . . .2 With NAACP support, Lawrence Nixon, a black doctor in El Paso, brought suit in  to overturn the state law that required a white primary by political parties, which prevented African Americans from voting. Nixon won rulings in  and  that the state by law could not require or allow a segregated primary.When Texas Democrats continued the white primary under local party rules, Richard R. Grovey,a Houston barber, unsuccessfully challenged the practice during the s.Finally,in ,black dentist Lonnie Smith of Houston, the Bayou City, with the aid of Texas and national attorneys funded by the NAACP, brought a new case to oppose the white primary. The U.S. Supreme Court responded in , by ruling the segregated party election unconstitutional. As a result, African American voter registration in Texas rose steadily and in percentage ranked first or second in the South by the s. These Texas white primary cases established the legal basis for similar cases in other states.3 Following their success in ending the white primary, black leaders worked through the ProgressiveVoters League and similar groups Voting, Desegregation, Economic Opportunity ▼▼▼  to register voters and provide political information. Although the poll tax still discouraged low-income voters,African American registration increased to almost  percent of potential black voters by . Most of the new voters supported the Democratic Party. The percentage of registered black voters climbed to  percent in , second highest in the South, after federal courts ruled against the poll tax, sixty-two years after its passage. One-person,one-vote court decisions forced congressional,legislative , and local government redistricting in the s and s. This opened the way for the election of African American candidates such as Barbara Jordan from Houston,who not only served in the Texas senate but went on to achieve national prominence in the U.S. Congress. Mickey Leland and other African Americans represented Houston and Dallas districts and black interests in Congress during the s and s. Wilhelmina Delco from Austin became a major advocate for education in the Texas legislature. The most visible political leaders in Texas became black mayors, such as Ron Kirk in Dallas and Lee Brown in Houston, who represented coalitions of minority and moderate...