Terry v. Adams
Case Overview
CITATION
ARGUED ON
DECIDED ON
DECIDED BY
345 U.S. 461
Jan. 16, 1953
May 4, 1953
Legal Issue
Does the Jaybird Democratic Association’s prohibition of black voters from its primaries violate the Fifteenth Amendment?
Holding
Yes, the entire electoral procedure established by the Jaybird Democratic Association violates the Fifteenth Amendment because it disenfranchised black voters based on race.
A magazine article discussing the formation of the Jaybirds | Credit: TX State Historical Association
Background
In 1889, the Jaybird Democratic Association was organized in Fort Bend County, Texas. Since its founding, the Jaybirds limited exclusively to white people, who automatically become members if their names are included on the official list of county voters. The Jaybirds were run like other political parties with an executive committee named from the county’s voting precincts. Expenses of the Jaybirds were paid for by the candidates in their primaries. Candidates for county offices submitted their names to the Jaybird Committee in the same manner as those who register with regular political parties across the country. Advertisements and posters proclaim that these candidates are running subject to the action of the Jaybird primary.
While no law required successful Jaybird candidates to enter the Democratic primary, they did so with near uniformity since 1889. Those candidates ran and won without opposition in the Democratic primaries and the general elections that followed. In effect, the Jaybirds were the dominant political group in the county since they organized and endorsed every county-wide official elected since 1889.
Qualified black voters in Fort Bend County including John Terry, Charlie Roberts, Willie Melton, and Arizona Fleming, sued the Jaybirds in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. The district judge granted an injunction against the Jaybirds, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed. The Supreme Court then granted certiorari.
8 - 1 decision for Terry
Terry
Adams
Clark
Jackson
Black
Reed
Minton
Douglas
Burton
Frankfurter
Vinson
-
Writing for the Court, Justice Hugo Black affirmed that the Fifteenth Amendment, which bans racial discrimination in voting by both State and national government, establishing “a national policy, obviously applicable to the right of Negroes not to be discriminated against as voters in elections.”
Black noted the significance of the fact “that precisely the same qualifications as those prescribed by Texas entitling electors to vote at county-operated primaries are adopted as the sole qualifications entitling electors to vote at the county-wide Jaybird primaries with a single proviso—Negroes are excluded.” Black pointed out that all parties conceded that such a proviso would be unconstitutional if enacted by the county, so “[t]he Jaybird Party thus brings into being and holds precisely the kind of election that the Fifteenth Amendment seeks to prevent. When it produces the equivalent of a prohibited election, the damage has been done.”
Black argued that “[f]or a state to permit such a duplication of its election processes is to permit a flagrant abuse of those processes to defeat the purposes of the Fifteenth Amendment.” Black posited that the Democrat primary and general election were “no more than the perfunctory ratifiers” of the Jaybird elections, so using the county-operated primary to ratify the result of the Jaybird’s discriminatory elections “merely compounds the offense.” He expressed, “[i]t violates the Fifteenth Amendment for a state, by such circumvention, to permit within its borders the use of any device that produces an equivalent of the prohibited election.”
Black explained that it doesn’t matter whether the state controls the Jaybirds primary because the Jaybird primary had become an integral part, “indeed the only effective part,” of the electoral process that determines the officeholders in the county. Ultimately, Black concluded that “[t]he effect of the whole procedure, Jaybird primary plus Democratic primary plus general election, is to do precisely that which the Fifteenth Amendment forbids—strip Negroes of every vestige of influence in selecting the officials who control the local county matters that intimately touch the daily lives of citizens.”