Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring, 1991 Page: 28
40 p. ; 26 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Negro Chamber of Commerce in 1936 at a YMCA membership drive. A. Maceo Smith is seated in the first
row on the right.primaries. From 1935 until 1944, African Americans
in Dallas and throughout the state could vote only in
municipal, school board, and general elections, but
not in the primaries which selected the candidates.2
A state poll tax was the second obstacle preventing
African Americans from participating in local and
state politics. The poll tax law, passed by the state
legislature in 1902, required each eligible voter to
pay a poll tax at the time he or she paid property taxes
each year. Each prospective voter also had to pay the
tax before February 1 in order to participate in all
elections held during the year. By the 1930s, the rate
of the poll tax was $1.75, and many African
Americans and poor whites chose not to vote rather
than pay the tax.3
Despite these attempts by the state of Texas
and the Democratic party to prevent African Americans
from participating in politics, some African
Americans in Dallas still voted. In fact, as early as
the 1920s the methods used to disfranchise African
28Americans became rallying points for black political
activism in Dallas. For example, the Dallas
Express, the African American newspaper with the
largest circulation in the city, ran periodic advertisements
and pleas urging African Americans in Dallas
to pay their poll taxes and vote. By 1928, however,
less than a third of the potential African American
electorate (approximately 2,944 out of an estimated
10,000 potential voters) in Dallas paid their poll
taxes and voted. Furthermore, the editors of the
Express examined the county poll tax lists and found
that even many of the city's African American
pastors, doctors, lawyers, and teachers had failed to
pay their poll taxes.4
In the 1930s several African American
organizations began a campaign to change this political
negligence and apathy. In 1933 the Dallas
Negro Chamber of Commerce hired Texarkana
native A. Maceo Smith as Executive Secretary to
develop permanent programs of economic and po
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Dallas County Heritage Society. Legacies: A History Journal for Dallas and North Central Texas, Volume 3, Number 1, Spring, 1991, periodical, 1991; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth35118/m1/30/: accessed May 5, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Dallas Historical Society.