January 30, 1983
It took 20 years, at least three U.S. Supreme Court decisions and the quiet determination of a tall, slender black physician from El Paso to move toward giving blacks a fair voice in Texas elections.
Most Texas blacks counted themselves as Republicans just after the Civil War, but many deserted the party to help James Stephen Hogg, reform Democratic candidate for governor, in 1892. Others labored in the birth of the Texas Populist party.
But by the turn of the century, black political power in Texas was almost nil.
El Paso County instituted a poll tax in 1902.
El Paso historian Conrey Bryson, in his book “Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and the White Primary,” says a good argument can be made that controlled voting – votes by minorities controlled by big interests – was responsible for the poll tax. “Nevertheless, the poll tax was one more deterrent to impoverished Negroes, who usually believed in January that $1.75 could be spent in more useful ways than the doubtful assurance of the right to vote many months later,” Bryson wrote.
Nixon, an east Texas native, arrived in El Paso in 1910, when blacks comprised 3 percent of the burgeoning city’s population.
By 1920, that percentage had dropped to 1.5 percent.
In May 1923 – a boom year for the Ku Klux Klan in state politics – the Texas legislature voted to deny blacks the right to vote in Democratic primaries. In a state like Texas, where winning the Democratic primary normally ensured success in the general election, that decision was tantamount to denying blacks any power at the voting polls.
Nixon was one of the charter members of the El Paso chapter of the NAACP, organized in 1910, the same year as the national organization.
El Paso blacks were very politically conscious, Bryson said, but not numerous enough to challenge the white political structure.
William Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP, personally chose Nixon as the best person to challenge the new sate law. “We are looking for someone who is not afraid.”
So, in July 1924, poll tax receipt in hand, Nixon stood in line to vote.
“As he recalled the event many years later, (Nixon) said, “The Judges were friends of mine. They inquired after my health, and when I presented my poll tax receipt, one of them said, ‘Dr. Nixon, you know we can’t let you vote.’ “’I know you can’t.” Dr. Nixon replied. ‘But I’ve got to try,’” Bryson wrote.
Nixon sued the two election judges. A federal judge in San Antonio threw out the case, and it went directly to the U.S. Supreme court.
They ordered the case to be tried, and an El Paso jury agreed with Nixon that the state had no right to abridge a black voter’s rights.
But that was circumvented when the Democratic State Executive Committee passed a resolution that only white registered Democrats could vote in the 1928 primary.
The NAACP decided to go to court again, with Nixon again as the plaintiff.
In July 1928, he again presented his poll tax receipt at the same East El Paso fire station. Again he was turned away.
Early the next year, another lawsuit was filed in federal court.
Once more, a federal judge dismissed the case. The dismissal was upheld by an appeals court.
In mid-1932, more than three years after the case was filed, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered it to be tried in El Paso, just as they had with Nixon’s first case.
Nixon again was victorious. But it would be 12 more years before he could vote in a primary.
Eventually, n a 1944 decision on a case originating from Houston, the Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional right to vote could not be indirectly denied. Six months later, all properly registered blacks in El Paso County were allowed to vote in the 1944 primary.
Nixon and his wife Drusilla were in an automobile accident in February 1966, and he died the next month at age 82. Mrs. Nixon now lives in Albuquerque with a daughter.
-Jeannie Kever
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