History of Slavery in Texas - Legacy

Legacy

June 19, the day of the Emancipation announcement, has been celebrated annually in Texas and other states as Juneteenth.

The longterm effects of slavery can be seen to this day in the state. The eastern quarter of the state, where cotton production depended on thousands of slaves, is sometimes considered the westernmost extension of the Deep South. It contains a significant number of Texas' African-American population. On the other hand, western parts of Texas were still a frontier during the American Civil War. While settled chiefly by Anglo-Southerners after the war, with the history of ranching, some of these parts have been more associated with the Southwest than the South.

After white Democrats regained power in Texas and other southern states in the 1870s, they imposed a system of legalized segregation and white supremacy. In 1876 white Democrats in Texas passed a new constitution requiring segregated schools and imposing a poll tax, which decreased the number of poor voters both black and white. By the late 19th century, they passed other Jim Crow rules. The system of school support was inadequate, and schools for minorities were seriously underfunded.

Around the start of the 20th century, Texas followed other southern states in passage of laws that made voter registration and elections more complicated. In practical terms, the provisions disfranchised most blacks, and many poor whites and Latinos, a condition that persisted into the 1960s. Such provisions included a grandfather clause, literacy tests and residency requirements difficult for sharecroppers and laborers to meet. In 1900 African Americans comprised 20% of the state's population of 3,084,710. The drop in proportion of population reflected greatly increased European immigration to the state in the 19th century, as well as population growth.

Like Georgia, the Texas Democratic Party adopted a whites-only primary. Since they politically dominated the state for decades after 1900, the only contest for office was at the primary level. The white primary was another way to exclude African Americans from making electoral decisions, and it was not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1944 in Smith v. Allwright. States that had used it adopted other means to keep most African Americans from voting.

African Americans immediately started raising legal challenges to disfranchisement, but early Supreme Court cases, such as Giles v. Harris (1903), upheld the states. Through organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), African Americans continued to work to regain their ability to exercise their civil and voting rights as citizens. The civil rights movement led to the US Congress passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which protected the rights of all citizens to integrated public facilities and enforcement of voting rights and over slaves.