John Marshall Robinson. Courtesy of Dale Lya Pierson

Dr. John Marshall Robinson, a black physician in Little Rock, began organizing Smith-Robinson Clubs and by October 1928, these clubs evolved into the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association (ANDA).  At the initial meeting held in late June 1928, Robinson acknowledged his own ties to the Republican Party—his grandfather was a Republican and Robinson voted Republican all his life; however, Robinson, according to an Arkansas Gazette account, “expressed the opinion that after 60 years of proof of gratitude for ‘emancipation,’ the negroes of Arkansas now should be free to express their admiration for [Arkansas’s Democratic] Senator Joe T. Robinson.”

The Preamble to the October 1928 Constitution and By-Laws and Order of Incorporation of the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association of Arkansas stated:

Based upon conclusions established by years of experience, it is the common understanding of the American people that government functions can be best promoted and maintained by or through political parities with well defined ideologies, and feelings that we have proved our loyalty and expressed our gratitude to the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln and that the day has arrived that the Negroes of this country must become more largely interested and integrated in all political faiths and creed, and feelings that those of who find ourselves in accord with political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson—the founder of the Democratic party—that shall take this method to declare our faith in and allegiance to the principle of the Democratic Party and in order to unite Negroes and promote continued service and activity, we have this day ordained and established this Constitution and By-Laws.




The document further specified three objectives: to “[u]nite Negroes who believe in principles of the Democratic Party and who will work to promote its best welfare and expansion”; “[e]courage to qualify as voters”; and “[e]ducate them in the philosophy of government and the mechanics of voting.”  By the end of July 1928, ANDA served between five thousand and ten thousand members in “practically every county” in the state including a two hundred and fifty member branch at the National Grand Temple , the headquarters of the Mosaic Templars of America in Little Rock.
In 1928, ANDA began a legal attack on the Democratic Party of Arkansas’s white-only primary system.  The ANDA built its strategy around the success of a similar lawsuit against the identical Democratic primary in Texas.  The Texas case, Nixon v. Herndon (1927), went to the United States Supreme Court, where the Court’s decision affirmed the unconstitutionality regarding a state sanctioned white-only primary, but did not address the rights of blacks to vote.  The ANDA hoped their suit would force the Court to address black suffrage directly.  In November 1928, Judge Richard M. Mann, sitting in for Pulaski Chancery Court Judge Frank H. Dodge, ruled in favor of the ANDA and allowed black voters in the Democratic primary, albeit with separate white and black ballots.  The ruling was short lived, as Dodge revoked Mann’s decision in August 1929, and appeals to the Arkansas Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court failed to produce a different outcome.

In December 1940, the ANDA reemerged following the rise of the Committee on Negro Organizations .  The ANDA, with a reported membership of 10,000, took up the discriminatory issue of the white-only primary.  Robinson formally requested the Democratic State Committee of Arkansas to allow blacks to vote in Democratic primaries.  Robinson conceded that the ANDA was not seeking mass voting by blacks.  Robinson’s request came as the United States Supreme Court debated the legal status of state primary elections.  In the Court’s 1941 decision, United States v. Classic, the high court found primaries administered by the state could potentially restrict and discriminate and concluded that “the authority of Congress…includes the authority to regulate primary elections.”  This ruling gave Congress the “authority to regulate primary elections” and removed the state’s authority.

With the legal opinion of the United States Supreme Court on their side, the ANDA tested black voting rights in the July 1942 Democratic primary.  ANDA secretary, J. H. McConico, the former National Auditor for the Mosaic Templars of America and former president of the Little Rock Branch of the NAACP, stated the ANDA was “not asking pity or any special favors, we are simply seeking to exercise those rights and privileges guaranteed to free men in a free county.”  On Election Day, Tuesday, July 28, 1942, blacks all over Little Rock were turned away.  According to news accounts, poll officials’ instructions specified “only white democrats are eligible to vote.”  ANDA’s president Robinson reportedly told blacks who were refused a ballot to “bow politely and leave without ado.”

In 1944, a United States Supreme Court decision in a new Texas case, Smith v. Allwright, affirmed that all-white primaries were unconstitutional.  Democratic officials in Arkansas conceded to allow blacks to vote in federal elections; however, party officials soon circumvented the ruling.  On May 14, 1944, the Democratic State Committee met to change the voting rules to allow black primary voters.  However, Governor Homer Adkins expressed hostility toward black voters in the Democratic primary and suggested letting the legislature deal with the ruling.  In June 1944 the Democratic Party added a loyalty clause to its rules that would, in theory, disallow voters, like blacks, who had been Republicans in the past.  Before the rules went into effect with the passage of the Trussell and Moore Bills in January 1945, African Americans voted in the July 25, 1944 Democratic primary.  As reported in the Christian Science Monitor and the New York Times, J. H. McConico received a ballot and voted.  Robinson claimed 10,000 blacks voted across the state and 600 in Pulaski County.  Other sources claimed blacks were denied ballots in Crossett, Kingsland, Warren, and Clarendon.

In the second primary runoff between Governor Homer Adkins and Congressman J. William Fulbright for an open senate seat, the two candidates timidly accepted black votes.  J. M. Robinson publicly endorsed Adkins in July, but Adkins replied the endorsement was “neither wished or solicited” and “if I cannot be nominated by the white voters of Arkansas I do not want the office.”  Adkins attacked Fulbright’s not guilty vote in Congress regarding accusations that William Pickens, a black treasury official and former NAACP member was a “Communist.”  Fulbright attempted to avoid the race issue by painting Adkins as a demagogue.  A Fulbright campaign poster titled, “Adkins’ Campaign of Hate—A Response” stated, “Race as an issue is the refuge of Demagogs [sic], who as candidates must divert attention from their records and from the Greed of Special Interests Supporting them for office.”  The poster, as an apparent swipe at Adkins, cites Dr. J. M. Robinson’s endorsement of Adkins as found in the Arkansas Gazette, July 20, 1944.

Despite the Supreme Court’s 1944 ruling, Arkansas’s state Democratic Party still clung to the white primary system.  In 1945 the General Assembly established separate primaries for state and federal elections, but the law was repealed after only one election.  In 1949, Arkansas Democratic party rules still stated “Party Membership shall consist of only legally qualified white electors…”.  Newly elected Governor Sidney McMath, a Democrat and racial moderate, questioned the legality of the words. In 1950 he used his influence to alter the rules and open the Party to all the state’s citizens. Earlier in 1948, as a candidate for governor, McMath had won the support of the ANDA and several other African American organizations.  Robinson as president of the Association wrote a letter to McMath, dated April 20, 1948:

I beg to state as per my previous declaration, that our organization is behind you and with you.  Anyone who pretends to represent the masses of the Negro voters in this state without clearing same through the Arkansas Negro Democratic Association is misleading you.

McMath tended to the African American community by appointing African Americans to state positions and in his unsuccessful attempts to repeal the state’s poll tax.  Governor McMath’s most prominent appointment of an African American to a state position was J.R. Booker to the board of Arkansas Agricultural, Mechanical, and Normal College at Pine Bluff (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff) in September 1950.  Booker, an attorney, was the son of Arkansas Baptist College president J.A. Booker.  McMath also appointed an interracial board to oversee McRae Memorial Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Alexander and a black superintendent of the Negro Boys Industrial School.

Studies have shown that poll taxes affected black voter turnout negatively.  Frederic Ogden’s 1958 “county by county analysis” of Arkansas’s poll tax concluded, among other factors, “the presence of large numbers of Negroes tends to lower the rate of payment.”  Between 1937 and 1938, religious, labor, agrarian and women’s organizations supported an amendment to the Arkansas Constitution in an effort to end the poll tax.  However, in light voter turnout, the measure was easily defeated (66.4 per cent voted against it) under fear of loosing the tax money for schools and an increase in black voters.  In 1948 McMath campaigned for the tax’s repeal and upon election asked the General Assembly to substitute a registration system for the tax.  Legislators from eastern Arkansas blocked the measure as well an anti-lynching proposal back by McMath.  In 1956, the former governor McMath, again spearheaded a poll tax repeal proposal.  Again the measure was defeated, but with higher voter turnout, due to the presidential election, with 56.6 per cent voting against the repeal.  In 1964, Arkansas, one of five southern states—Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas—still administered a poll tax; however the practice became unconstitutional on January 23, 1964 when South Dakota became the 38th state to ratify the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution.