Smith v. Allwright
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| Smith v. Allwright | ||||||||
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 Supreme Court of the United States |
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| Reargued January 12, 1944 Decided April 3, 1944 |
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| Holding | ||||||||
| Primary elections must be open to voters of all race. | ||||||||
| Court membership | ||||||||
| Chief Justice: Harlan Fiske Stone Associate Justices: Owen Josephus Roberts, Hugo Black, Stanley Forman Reed, Felix Frankfurter, William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, Robert H. Jackson, Wiley Blount Rutledge |
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| Case opinions | ||||||||
| Majority by: Reed Joined by: Stone, Black, Douglas, Murphy, Jackson, Rutledge Concurrence by: Frankfurter (in the judgement of the court only) Dissent by: Roberts |
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Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944), was an important decision of the United States Supreme Court with regard to voting rights and, by extension, racial desegregation.
Lonnie E. Smith, a black voter in Texas, sued for the right to vote in a primary election being conducted by the Democratic Party. The law he challenged allowed the party to enforce a rule requiring all voters in its primary to be white. At this point in history, the Republican Party was so weak in the South that most Southern elections were decided by the outcome of the Democratic primary. Southern States claimed that the Democratic Party was a private organization, while Smith said that the law in question essentially disenfranchised him by denying him the ability to vote in what was essentially the only meaningful election in his jurisdiction. The Court agreed and found in his favor. Many felt that this set the stage for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) ten years later and helped lead the way into the Civil Rights Era.
Many Southern politicians of the era who are now largely regarded as progressive nonetheless were staunch supporters of the "white primary", perhaps most notably J. William Fulbright and Claude Pepper, who would nonetheless support anti-segregation candidates such as Henry A. Wallace in national elections.
