Case Name: NIXON v. CONDON et al.
Court: Supreme Court of the United States
Jurisdiction: United States
Decision Date: 1932-05-02
Citations: 286 U.S. 73
Docket Number: No. 265
Parties: NIXON v. CONDON et al.
Judges: I am authorized to say that Mr. Justice Van Devanter, Mr. Justice Sutherland and Mr. Justice Butler concur in this opinion.
Reporter: United States Reports
Volume: 286
Pages: 73–106

Head Matter:
NIXON v. CONDON et al.
No. 265.
Argued January 7, 1932.
Reargued March 15, 1932.
Decided May 2, 1932.
Messrs. James Marshall and Nathan R. Margold, with whom Messrs. Arthur B. Spingarn, and Fred C. Knollenberg were on the brief, for petitioner.
Mr. Ben R. Howell, with whom Mr. Thornton Hardie was on the brief, for respondents.
Messrs. J. Alston Atkins, Carter W. Wesley, and J. M. Nabrit, Jr., by leave of Court, filed a brief as amici curiae.

Opinion:
Me. Justice Caedozo
delivered the opinion of the Court.
The petitioner, a Negro, has brought this .action against judges of election in Texas to recover damages for their refusal by reason of his race or color to permit him to cast his vote at a primary election.
This is not the first time that he has found it necessary to invoke the jurisdiction of the federal courts in vindication of privileges secured to him by the Federal Constitution.
In Nixon v. Herndon, 273 U. S. 536, decided at the October Term, 1926, this court had before it a statute of the State of Texas (Article 3093a, Revised Civil Statutes, afterwards numbered 3107) whereby the legislature had said that " in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a democratic party primary election [held in that State]," and that "should a negro vote in a democratic primary election, the ballot shall be void," and election officials were directed to throw it out. While the mandate was in force, the Negro was shut out from a share in primary elections, not in obedience to the will of the party speaking through the party organs, but by the command of the State itself, speaking by the voice of its chosen representatives. At the suit of this petitioner, the statute was adjudged void as an infringement of his rights and liberties under the Constitution of the United States.
Promptly after the announcement of that decision, the legislature of Texas enacted a new statute (L. 1927, c. 67) repealing the article condemned by this court; declaring that the effect of the decision was to create an emergency with a need for immediate action; and substituting for the article so repealed another bearing the same number. By the article thus substituted, " every political party in this State through its State Executive Committee shall have the power to prescribe the qualifications of its own members and shall in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party; provided that no person shall ever be denied the right to participate in a primary in this State because of former political views or affiliations or because of membership or non-membership in organizations other than the political party."
Acting under the new statute, the State Executive Committee of the Democratic party adopted a resolution " that all white democrats who are qualified under the constitution and laws of Texas and who subscribe to the statutory pledge provided in Article 3110, Revised Civil Statutes of Texas, and none other, be allowed to participate in the primary elections to be held July 28, 1928', and August 25, 1928," and the chairman and secretary were directed to forward copies of the resolution to the committees in the several counties.
On July 28, 1928, the petitioner, a citizen of the United States, and qualified to vote unless disqualified by the foregoing resolution, presented himself at the polls and requested that he be furnished with a ballot. The respondents, the judges of election, declined to furnish the ballot or to permit the vote on the ground that the petitioner was a Negro and that by force of the resolution of the Executive Committee only white Democrats were allowed to be voters at the Democratic primary. The refusal was followed by this action for damages. In the District Court there was a judgment of dismissal, 34 F. (2d) 464, which was affirmed by the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, 49 F. (2d) 1012. A writ of certiorari brings the cause here.
Barred from voting at a primary the petitioner has been, and this for the sole reason that his color is not white. The result for him is no different from what it was when his cause was here before. The argument for the respondents is, however, that identity of result has been attained through essential diversity of method. We are reminded that the Fourteenth Amendment is a restraint upon the States and not upon private persons unconnected with a State. United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542; Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U. S. 303; Ex parte Virginia, 100 U. S. 339, 346; James v. Bowman, 190 U. S. 127, 136. This line of demarcation drawn, we are told that a political party is merely a voluntary association; that it has inherent power like voluntary associations generally to determine its own membership; that the new article of the statute, adopted in place of the mandatory article of exclusion condemned by this court, has no other effect than to restore to the members of the party the power that would have been theirs if the lawmakers had been silent; and that qualifications thus established are as far aloof from the impact of constitutional restraint as those for membership in a golf club or for admission to a Masonic lodge.
Whether a political party in Texas has inherent power today without restraint by any law to determine its own membership, we are not required at this time either to affirm or to deny. The argument for the petitioner is that quite apart from the article in controversy, there are other provisions of the Election Law whereby the privilege of unfettered choice has been withdrawn or abridged (citing, e. g., Articles 2955, 2975, 3100, 3104, 3105, 3110, 3121, Revised Civil Laws); that nomination at a primary is in many circumstances required by the statute if nomination is to be made at all (Article 3101); that parties and their representatives have become the custodians of official power (Article 3105); and that if heed is to be given to the realities of political life, they are now agencies of the State, the instruments by which government becomes a living thing. In that view, so runs the argument, a party is still free to define for itself the political, tenets of its members, but to those who profess its tenets there may be no denial of its privileges.
A narrower base will serve for our judgment in the cause at hand. Whether the effect of Texas legislation has been to work so complete a transformation of the concept of a political party as a voluntary association, we do not now decide. Nothing in this opinion is to be taken as carrying with it an intimation that the court is ready or unready to follow the petitioner so far. As to that, decision must be postponed until decision becomes necessary. Whatever our conclusion might be if the statute had remitted to the party the untrammeled power to prescribe the qualifications of its members, nothing of the kind was done. Instead, the statute lodged the power in a committee, which excluded the petitioner and others of his race, not by virtue of any authority delegated by the party, but by virtue of an authority originating or supposed to originate in the mandate of the law.
We recall at this point the wording of the statute invoked by the respondents. " Every political party in this State through its State Executive Committee shall have the power to prescribe the qualifications of its own members and shall in its own way determine who shall be qualified to vote or otherwise participate in such political party." Whatever inherent power a State political party has to determine the content of its membership resides in the State convention. Bryce, Modern Democracies, vol. 2, p. 40. There platforms of principles are announced and the tests of party allegiance made known to the world. What is true in that regard of parties generally, is true more particularly in Texas, where the statute is explicit in committing to the State convention the formulation of the party faith (Article 3139). The State Executive Committee, if it is the sovereign organ of the party, is not such by virtue of any powers inherent in its being. It is, as its name imports, a committee and nothing more, a committee to be chosen by the convention and to consist of a chairman and thirty-one members, one from each senatorial district of the State (Article 3139). To this committee the statute here in controversy has attempted to confide authority to determine of its own motion the requisites of party membership and in so doing to speak for the party as a whole. Never has the State convention made declaration of a will to bar Negroes of the State from admission to the party ranks. Counsel for the respondents so conceded upon the hearing in this court. Whatever power of exclusion has been exercised by the members of the committee has come to them, therefore, not as the delegates of the party, but as the delegates of the State. Indeed, adherence to the statute leads to the conclusion that a resolution once adopted by the committee must continue to be binding upon the judges of election though the party in convention may have sought to override it, unless the committee, yielding to the moral force of numbers, shall revoke its earlier action and obey the party will. Power so intrenched is statutory, not inherent. If the State had not conferred it, there would be hardly color of right to give a basis for its exercise.
Our conclusion in that regard is not affected by what was ruled by the Supreme Court of Texas in Love v. Wilcox, 119 Tex. 256; 28 S. W. (2d) 515, or by the Court of Civil Appeals in White v. Lubbock, 30 S. W. (2d) 722. The ruling in the first case was directed to the validity of the provision whereby neither the party nor the committee is to be permitted to make former political affiliations the test of party regularity. There were general observations in the opinion as to the functions of parties and committees. They do not constitute the decision. The decision was merely this, that " the committee whether viewed as an agency of the State or as a mere agency of the party is not authorized to take any action which is forbidden by an express and valid statute." The ruling in the second case, which does not come from the highest court of the State, upholds the constitutionality of § 3107 as amended in 1927, and speaks of the exercise of the inherent powers of the party-by the act of its proper officers. There is nothing to show, however, that the mind of the court was directed to the point that the members of a committee would not have been the proper officers to exercise the inherent powers of the party if the statute had not attempted to clothe them with that quality. The management of the affairs of a group already associated together as members of a party is obviously a very different function from that of determining who the members of the group shall be. If another view were to be accepted, a committee might rule out of the party a faction distasteful to itself, and exclude the very men who had helped to bring it into existence. In any event, the Supreme Court of Texas has not yet spoken on the subject with clearness or finality, and nothing in its pronouncements brings us to the belief that in the absence of a statute or other express grant it would recognize a mere committee as invested with all the powers of the party assembled in convention. Indeed, its latest decision dealing with any aspect of the statute here in controversy, a decision handed down on April 21, 1932 (Love v. Buckner, 49 S. W. (2d) 425), describes the statute as constituting " a grant of power " to the State Executive Com mittee to determine who shall participate in the primary elections. What was questioned in that case was the validity of a pledge exacted from the voters that it was their bona fide purpose to support the party nominees. The court in upholding the exaction found a basis for its ruling in another article of the Civil Statutes (Art. 3167), in an article of the Penal Code (Art. 340), and in the inherent power of the committee to adopt regulations reasonably designed to give effect to the obligation assumed by an elector in the very act of voting. To clinch the argument the court then added that if all these sources of authority were inadequate, the legislature had made in Article 3107 an express " grant of power " to determine qualifications generally. There is no suggestion in the opinion that -the inherent power of the committee was broad enough (apart from legislation) to permit it to prescribe the extent of party membership, to say to a group of voters, ready as was the petitioner to take the statutory pledge, that one class should be eligible and another not. On the contrary, the whole opinion is instinct with the concession that pretensions so extraordinary must find their warrant in a statute. The most that can be said for the respondents is that the inherent powers of the Committee are still unsettled in the local courts. Nothing in the state of the decisions requires us to hold that they have been settled in a manner that would be subversive of the fundamental postulates of party organization. The suggestion is offered that in default of in herent power or of statutory grant the committee may have been armed with the requisite authority by vote of the convention. Neither at our bar nor on the trial was the case presented on that theory. At every stage of the case the assumption has been made that authority, if there was any, was either the product of the statute or was inherent in the committee under the law of its creation.
We discover no significance, and surely no significance favorable to the respondents, in earlier acts of legislation whereby the power to prescribe additional qualifications w,as conferred on local committees in the several counties of the State. L. 1903, c. 101, § 94. The very fact that such legislation was thought necessary is a token that the committees were without inherent power. We do not impugn the competence of the legislature to designate the agencies whereby the party faith shall be declared and the party discipline enforced. The pith of the .matter is simply this, that when those agencies are invested with an authority independent of the will of the association in whose name they undertake to speak, they become to that extent the organs of the State itself, the repositories of official power. They are then the governmental instruments whereby parties- are organized and regulated to the end that government itself may be established or continued. What they do in that relation, they must do in submission to the mandates of equality and liberty that bind officials everywhere. They are not acting in matters of merely private concern like the directors or agents of business corporations. They are acting in matters of high public interest, matters intimately connected with the capacity of government to exercise its functions unbrokenly and smoothly. Whether in given circumstances parties or their committees are agencies of government within the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amendment is a question which this court will determine for itself. It is not concluded upon such an inquiry by decisions rendered elsewhere. The test is not whether the members of the Executive Committee are the representatives of .the State in the strict sense in which an agent is the representative of his principal. The test is whether they are to be classified as representatives of the State to such an extent and in such a sense that the great restraints of the Constitution set limits to their action..
With the problem thus laid bare and its essentials exposed to view, the case is seen to be ruled by Nixon v. Herndon, supra. Delegates of the State's power have discharged their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black. Ex parte Virginia, supra; Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U. S. 60, 77. The Fourteenth Amendment, adopted as it was with special solicitude for the equal protection of members of the Negro race, lays a duty upon the court to level by its judgment these barriers of color.
The judgment below is reversed and the cause remanded for further proceedings in conformity with this opinion. Reversed.
" We are bound to give effect to a grant of power to the State Executive Committee of a party to determine who shall participate in the acts of the party otherwise than by voting in a primary, when the Legislature grants the power in language too plain to admit of controversy, and when the determination of the Committee conflicts with no other statutory requirement or prohibition, especially when the Committee's determination makes effectual the public policy of the State as revealed in its statutes." Love v. Buckner, supra.