Voter Suppression- All White Democratic Primaries

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to vote regardless of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.” In attempts to suppress the black vote, states have therefore had to devise mechanisms to indirectly rather than directly target black voters. Take, for example, the all-white Democratic Party primary elections. These prevented black voters from voting in the primaries based on the argument that they were private elections and therefore not subject to the Fifteenth Amendment. Since Arkansas was then a one party Democratic state, the primary election rather than the general election was where power lay. In 1944, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawed the use of all-white primaries. For a while, the party held integrated federal primaries and segregated local and state primaries. By 1950, it had dropped this charade. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.