Some background on one of the two principle means used in Texas to limit minority voting.
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Following Reconstruction, white political leaders in Texas and other southern states sought to take the vote from black voters. As a disenfranchisement device, the poll tax discouraged poor whites as well as blacks from voting, while enabling blacks who paid the tax to vote. Party rules or state laws that barred blacks from the Democratic primary, however, could virtually disenfranchise all blacks (and only blacks) by keeping them out of the election that generally determined who would hold office in a Democratic-dominated state. When the Texas legislature passed a white primary law in 1923, it thrust Texans and the Texas white primary into the center of a struggle to have the United States Supreme Court declare all white primaries unconstitutional.
In the years immediately following Reconstruction no statewide primaries existed, and virtually all politically involved Texas blacks were Republicans. Especially in East Texas counties with black majorities, blacks often did participate in local politics. The first attempt to end local Republican rule where blacks had a decided majority was in Harrison County, where the so-called Citizen's Party, formed in 1878, managed to upset the county Republicans by stuffing ballot boxes and using intimidation. Similar efforts and occurrences took place in many other counties in the 1870s and 1880s, including Leon, Montgomery, Colorado, DeWitt, Fort Bend, Waller, Wharton, and other counties. When third-party movements, such as the People's party of the 1890s, appealed to black Texans as well as to some white Democrats, black voters also influenced state elections. Even some Democratic candidates sought black votes in response to the Populist challenge.
The Populists soon faded as a significant force, but white leaders began to search for ways of assuring white unity and hegemony. Governor James S. Hogg and state representative Alexander W. Terrell supported legislation to require and regulate primaries. They wished to counter vote fraud and believed that blacks should be excluded from Democratic primaries. Terrell's primary legislation was passed in 1903 and amended frequently thereafter. Some local party leaders adopted rules barring blacks from participating in the primary, but the law was not universally successful in disenfranchising blacks throughout Texas.
When more and more Anglo farmers moved into South Texas, conflict with established Mexican-American ranchers ensued as the two groups struggled for political and economic control of the region. The new farmers sought to eliminate Mexican Texans, who generally supported the old ranchers through the patron system, from the political process. In addition to using the formal and informal devices associated with the White Primary in the rest of Texas, organizations such as Dimmit County's White Man's Primary Association, established in 1914, disfranchised Mexican Americans in local elections and controlled the local labor supply.
