It started after the Civil War.
After the white Southern traitors got their asses beat like a Pentecostal church tambourine, the Republican Party was dominated by newly enfranchised Black voters. Across the South, Black and white factions clashed for control of the party, but nowhere more fiercely than in Texas. When a faction of white delegates tried to physically kick Black representatives out of the 1888 Republican state convention in Fort Worth, Norris Wright Cuney, the dominant Black politician who controlled the Texas GOP, coined a nickname for the anti-Black Republican campaign:
By the early 1900s, every former Confederate state’s Republican Party had a “Lily-White” faction. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party came up with its own system to disenfranchise Black voters. Whites were a minority in Louisiana in 1890. Plus, you’d rather snatch a Coca-Cola from a polar bear’s jaws than fight a dude from New Orleans.
So in 1892, Louisiana’s Democratic Party developed a way to keep the party white—the all-white primary. While most people know about the all-white primary system, few understand that primaries did not exist prior to this effort to disenfranchise Black voters.
Primaries were created to keep Black people from voting.
Today’s Reading List:
Voting confusion in Texas rooted in conspiracy theories about ballot counting by Jane C. Timm
‘Evilest White Woman on Earth’: The Criminal Injustice of Terra Morehead by Michael Harriot
A Criminal Injustice: How a City Ignored the Rape, Murder and Terrorism of Black Women for Four Decades by Michael Harriot
