ting lists while continuing to
interpose severe obstacles upon Negroes seeking qualification as voters,
several States, beginning in 1895, enacted temporary laws whereby
persons who were voters, or descendants of voters on January 1, 1867,
could be registered notwithstanding their inability to meet any literacy
requirements. Unable because of the date to avail themselves of the same
exemption, Negroes were thus left exposed to disfranchisement on grounds
of illiteracy while whites no less illiterate were enabled to become
permanent voters. With the achievement of this intended result, most
States permitted their laws to lapse; but Oklahoma's grandfather clause
was enacted as a permanent amendment to the State constitution; and when
presented with an opportunity to pass on its validity, a unanimous Court
condemned the standard of voting thus established as recreating and
perpetuating "the very conditions which the [Fifteenth] Amendment was
intended to destroy."[3] Nor, when Oklahoma followed up this defeat with
a statute of 1916 which provided that all persons, except those who
voted in 1914, who were qualified to vote in 1916 but who failed to
register between April 30 and May 11, 1916 (sick persons and persons
absent had a second opportunity to register between May 11 and June 30,
1916) should be perpetually disfranchised, did the Court experience any
difficulty in holding the same to be repugnant to the amendment.[4] That
amendment, Justice Frankfurter declared, "nullifies sophisticated as
well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous
procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the
franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may
remain unrestricted as to race."[5] More precisely, the effect of this
statute, as discerned by the Court, was automatically to continue as
permanent voters, without their being obliged to register again, all
white persons who were on registry lists in 1914 by virtue of the
hitherto invalidated grandfather clause; whereas Negroes, prevented from
registering by that clause, were afforded only a twenty-day registration
opportunity to avoid permanent disfranchisement.

Application to Party Primaries

Indecision was displayed by the Court, however, when it was first called
upon to deal with the exclusion of Negroes from participation in primary
elections.[6] Prior to its becoming convinced that primary contests were
in fact elections,[7]