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White primaries were primary elections in the Southern states of the United States of America in which only white voters were permitted to participate. White primaries were established by the Democratic Party or state legislatures in many Southern states after 1890, as part of a variety of methods used to achieve disenfranchisement of most black and other minority voters. The Texas legislature passed a law in 1923 that delegated authority to state conventions of political parties to make rules for their primaries. They banned black and Mexican-American minorities from participating in Democratic Party primaries, the dominant party in Southern states. The United States Supreme Court heard three Texas cases related to white primaries in 1927, 1932, and 1935. In the 1927 and 1932 Texas white primary cases, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, saying that state laws related to establishing a white primary violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Texas changed its law in response. In ''Grovey v. Townsend'' (1935), the Supreme Court ruled that the practice was constitutional, as it was administered by the Democratic Party, which was a private, not a state institution. In 1944, the Supreme Court case ruled against the Texas white primary system in ''Smith v. Allwright''.〔''Smith v. Allwright,'' 321 U.S. 649 (1944)〕 In ''Smith v. Allwright,'' the Supreme Court ruled on a challenge to the 1923 Texas state law. It ruled that the law violated the protections of the Constitution because the state allowed a discriminatory rule to be established by the Democratic Party. After the case, most Southern states ended their selectively inclusive white primaries. They retained other devices of disfranchisement, such as poll taxes and literacy tests, which generally survived legal challenges although they were administered in a discriminatory manner that resulted in most blacks being excluded from the political system in the South until after the 1960s. ==Establishment and significance of white primaries== (詳細はDemocratic party chapters started to use white primaries in the late 19th century, as part of efforts to suppress black voting and weaken the Republican Party in the South. In an effort to maintain white supremacy, Democratic activists had often used violence and fraud at elections to suppress black voting. Following the loss of power to the biracial coalition of Populists and Republicans, the Democrat-controlled state legislatures systematically adopted electoral rules in new constitutions or specific laws to disenfranchise black voters by making voter registration and voting more difficult. A number of devices were used, including poll taxes, residency requirements, record-keeping requirements and literacy tests, all administered by white officials. They protected illiterate or poor white voters by such devices as grandfather clauses. Application of these measures was done in such a discriminatory way that not even educated, middle-class blacks managed to stay on the voter rolls. As a result there was a dramatic drop in black voting across the South, with related weakening of the Republican Party in the region. White Democrats were successful in establishing and maintaining a one-party system in most southern states, and they developed great power in Congress, controlling important chairmanships of committees. Black citizens excluded from voting were also shut out of running for local offices, serving on juries, or in other civil offices, and were forced into second-class status. To strengthen the exclusion, Texas and some other states established white primaries, a "selectively inclusive" system that permitted only whites to vote in the primaries. By legally considering the general election as the only state-held election, they gave white members of the Democratic Party control of the decision-making process within the party and the state. Because the Democratic Party dominated the political systems of all the Southern states after Reconstruction, its state and local primary elections usually determined which candidate would ultimately win office in the general election. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「white primaries」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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