Nixon v. Condon

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Nixon v. Condon
Supreme Court of the United States
Reargued March 15, 1932 Decided May 2, 1932
Full case name: L.A. Nixon v. James Condon and another Citations: 286 U.S. 73; 52 S.Ct. 484; 88 A.L.R. 458; 76 L.Ed. 984 Prior history: 34 F.2d 464 (W.D. Tex. 1929), aff'd, 49 F.2d 1012 (5th Cir. 1931), cert. granted, 284 U.S. 601 (1931).
Holding
Court membership
Chief Justice: Charles Evans Hughes Associate Justices: Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds, Louis Brandeis, George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, Harlan Fiske Stone, Owen Josephus Roberts, Benjamin N. Cardozo
Case opinions
Majority by: Cardozo Joined by: Hughes, Brandeis, Stone, Roberts Dissent by: McReynolds Joined by: Van Devanter, Sutherland, Butler
Laws applied
U.S. Const., amend. XIV, Tex. Civ. St. art. 3107

Nixon v. Condon, 286 U.S. 73 (1932), was a case decided by the United States Supreme Court.

In a previous case, Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the Court had struck down a Texas statute that prohibited blacks from participating in the Texas Democratic primary election. Very shortly after that decision, the Texas Legislature repealed the invalidated statute, declared that the effect of the Nixon decision was to create an emergency requiring immediate action, and replaced the old statute with a new one. The new law provided that every political party would henceforth "in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party."

Under the authority of this law, the executive committee of the Texas Democratic Party adopted a resolution stating that "all white democrats who are qualified under the constitution and laws of Texas" would be allowed to vote. In the 1928 Democratic primary, Nixon again tried to vote. He was again denied, on the ground that the resolution allowed only whites to vote (Nixon was black). Thereafter Nixon sued the judges of elections in federal court.

The defendants argued that there was no state action and therefore no equal protection violation, because the Democratic Party was "merely a voluntary association" which had the power to choose its own membership. The Court, however, reasoned that because the Texas statute gave the party's executive committee the authority to exclude would-be members of the party – an authority, the Court said, that the executive committee hitherto had not possessed – the executive committee was acting under a state grant of power. Because there was state action, the case was controlled by Nixon v. Herndon, which prohibited state officials from "discharg[ing] their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black."