the Court had relied upon the equal protection
clause to strike down a Texas White Primary Law[8] and a subsequent
Texas statute which contributed to a like exclusion by limiting voting
in primaries to members of State political parties as determined by the
central committees thereof.[9] When exclusion of Negroes was thereafter
perpetuated by political parties acting not in obedience to any
statutory command, this discrimination was for a time viewed as not
constituting State action and therefore not prohibited by either the
Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amendments.[10] But this holding was
reversed nine years later when the Court, in Smith _v._ Allwright,[11]
declared that where the selection of candidates for public office is
entrusted by statute to political parties, a political party in making
its selection at a primary election is a State agency, and hence may not
under this amendment exclude Negroes from such elections.

At a very early date the Court held that literacy tests which are
drafted so as to apply alike to all applicants for the voting franchise
would be deemed to be fair on their face, and in the absence of proof of
discriminatory enforcement could not be viewed as denying the equal
protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.[12] More
recently, the Boswell amendment to the constitution of Alabama, which
provided that only persons who understood and could explain the
Constitution of the United States to the reasonable satisfaction of
boards of registrars was found, both in its object as well as in the
manner of its administration, to be contrary to the Fifteenth
Amendment. The legislative history of the adoption of the Alabama
provision disclosed that "the ambiguity inherent in the phrase
'understand and explain' * * * was purposeful * * * and was intended as
a grant of arbitrary power in an attempt to obviate the consequences of"
Smith _v._ Allwright.[13]

Enforcement

Two major questions have presented themselves for decision as a
consequence of the exercise by Congress of its powers to enforce this
article, an amendment which the Court has acknowledged to be
self-executing.[14] These have pertained to the limitations which the
amendment imposes on the competency of Congress legislating thereunder
to punish racial discrimination founded upon more than a denial of
suffrage and to penalize such denials when perpetrated by private
individuals not acting under color of public author