ON MARCH 13, 1902, WITH ALABAMA’S NEW CONSTITUTION by then in force, Jackson W. Giles walked into the courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama, to once again register to vote. Giles, who worked as a janitor at the post office, had voted in Montgomery for more than twenty years, but like every other adult male, he now had to reregister. Giles’s qualifications seemed excellent. He was employed, literate, owned his home, had no criminal record, and had paid his poll tax of $1.50. He was also black.
Alabama registrars had been extremely aggressive in applying the new voting regulations, but with an eye to the court battles to come, they had been careful to not shut out every black voter. Lifetime voting rights were granted to a trickle of African American veterans of the army or navy who presented valid discharge papers, although many more were turned away. Booker T. Washington, of course, received lifetime registration, as did a handful of other prominent African Americans. As Governor William Dorsey Jelks noted, registrars “would carry out the spirit of the Constitution, which looks to the registration of all white men not convicted of crimes, and only a few Negroes.”1 (Jelks was also widely known for his advocacy of lynching as an appropriate punishment for African Americans accused of attacking a white woman.)
Jackson Giles was not Booker T. Washington, however, and so his application to register to vote was denied, as were those of many of his fellow employees at the post office. Rather than simply accept the refusal, Giles and some of the others formed the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association of Alabama specifically to protest the voting rules of the 1901 Alabama Constitution. Giles was elected president and the group expressed determination to mount a legal challenge that they were willing to press all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Giles chose to create the case in his own name because he was unwilling to expose any of his fellow members to the risks that would accrue to any black man who took on whites—loss of employment, property, or even life. But in addition to his own claim, Giles would also represent 5,000 other qualified African Americans similarly denied the right to register.
Lawsuits were expensive, however, and at the group’s first meeting they raised only $200, a tenth of the sum they thought necessary to begin. They used some of that to take out ads in African American newspapers under the heading “AN APPEAL: To the Colored Citizens of Alabama.” They claimed, “The requirements of the Board of Registrars are altogether out of harmony with law and justice,” and that “the workings of the new constitution are in conflict with the Federal constitution” and that “the grandfather clause was unconstitutional.” They asked for donations to raise the $2,000 to begin a lawsuit.2
Giles was no lawyer, but still, in preparing his case for federal court, he knew he must present all the proof that Cornelius Jones in Williams v. Mississippi had not. He set to compiling reams of statistics, newspaper reports, and affidavits, all to demonstrate that the law was being employed solely to discriminate against a specific class of individual, in this case black voters. It was an enormous task.
To Giles’s surprise, soon afterward, a prominent African American attorney from New York named Wilford H. Smith suddenly appeared in Montgomery, claiming to represent something called the “Citizens Protective League,” and offered to step in and supply the appropriate resources, and then handle the case in court. A stunned but happy Jackson Giles gratefully accepted, unsure how his case had become known to an attorney in New York.
* * *
During the four months that the Alabama constitutional convention met, Booker T. Washington had campaigned vigorously against the grandfather clause and for equal application of the law. With white state leaders, such as Governor Jelks, he attempted to use his national fame to buttress fawning communications, seeking concessions that would at least provide the same voter registration standards to blacks and whites. He had also met secretly with black leaders to urge them to use all their resources to register protests against this provision. This was all a fruitless exercise, of course, since the whole point of drafting a new constitution was to make voting standards different for blacks and whites, and black leaders had no resources that actually mattered.
That left the courts as the only avenue to pursue. Washington was savvy enough politically to realize how slim were his chances, so he used his influence with President Roosevelt to try to pry out a bit of an advantage. Roosevelt had taken to consulting Washington on appointments in the South, and as it happened, there was a key federal judgeship available in the very court where any challenge to the Alabama Constitution would be heard. The incumbent, John Bruce, a Ulysses Grant appointee, had died in October 1901, and the president asked Washington who he would like to see as a replacement. Local black leaders had urged Washington to recommend a Republican, but Washington thought a Democrat—if it was the right Democrat—would give him a better shot at attacking the voter registration provisions of the new constitution. He chose Thomas Jones, a former Confederate officer, Alabama governor, and constitutional convention delegate, because Jones, whom Washington knew personally, had been a fierce opponent of the grandfather clause. Roosevelt accepted the recommendation and Jones was seated on December 17, 1901.
Even with Thomas Jones on the bench, Wilford Smith had no illusions as to the odds against pressing a successful action. He would write later,
With the population of the South distinctly divided into two classes, not the rich and poor, not the educated and ignorant, not the moral and immoral, but simply whites and blacks, all negroes being generally regarded as inferior and not entitled to the same rights as any white person, it is bound to be a difficult matter to obtain fair and just results when there is any sort of conflict between the races.3
In the meantime, Washington and Smith were forced to sit and watch while Alabama registrars applied the temporary plan in a transparently discriminatory fashion, as Smith described:
Under the Alabama Constitution, a soldier in the Civil War, either on the Federal or Confederate side, is entitled to qualification. When a negro goes up to register as a soldier he is asked for his discharge. When he presents it he is asked, “How do we know that you are the man whose name is written in this discharge? Bring us two white men whom we know and who will swear that you have not found this paper, and that they know that you were a soldier in the company and regiment in which you claim to have been.” This, of course, could not be done, and the ex-soldier who risked his life for the Union is denied the right to vote.
The same Constitution provides that if not a soldier or the legal descendant of one, an elector must be of good character and understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a Republican form of government. When a negro claims qualifications under the good character and understanding clauses he is put through an examination similar to the following:
“What is a republican form of government?”
“What is a limited monarchy?”
“What islands did the United States come into possession of by the Spanish-American War?”
“What is the difference between Jeffersonian Democracy and Calhoun principles, as compared to the Monroe Doctrine?”
“If the Nicaragua Canal is cut, what will be the effect if the Pacific Ocean is two feet higher than the Atlantic?”
Should these questions be answered satisfactorily, the negro must still produce two white men known to the registrars to testify to his good character.4
Inability to answer some of these seemed to have been the reason Jackson Giles had been disqualified. He was not alone. Black lawyers, schoolmasters, decorated war veterans, business owners, and even public officeholders were not allowed to register because they could not answer the quiz-show-caliber questions put to them by registrars—who certainly would have been unable to answer them either—or find whites willing to take the risk of vouching for a black man. In the end, the new constitution worked exactly as planned. Of the 181,000 African Americans eligible to vote in Alabama, only 3,000 would be registered under the new system.5
Still, a legal challenge could not be undertaken precipitously—finding the right plaintiff was crucial. The Louisiana endeavor had come to naught largely because the only plaintiff proponents could find was illiterate and without property. After Booker T. Washington heard of the appeal for funds by the Colored Men’s Suffrage Association and did a bit of checking, he got in touch with Wilford Smith in New York and told him to come to Montgomery without delay. Their search for a plaintiff was over—Jackson Giles was perfect.
And so, unbeknownst to both Giles and those he intended to sue, Smith had been hired with great secrecy by the very same man that Alabama whites had tried so hard to bring to their side and that other black leaders accused of being a sellout.
It was a secret that Washington intended to be kept, since his ability to have any influence at all depended on whites believing he accepted both segregation and the phony restrictions—except the grandfather clause—that Southerners had placed on African American voting. To hide his true intentions, he directed that all correspondence between him and Smith be handled by Emmett Scott. They used code names for important messages, with Washington himself at first referred to with a series of false names, such as “His Nibs” or “the Wizard.” Smith seems to have been called “Filipino.” When Washington realized that anyone reading the letters would know immediately to whom those names referred, he instructed Emmett Scott to switch to the aliases R. C. Black (for Scott) and J. C. May (for Smith) and leave references to himself out altogether.
In early May, Wilford Smith filed suit against E. Jeff Harris and the other members of the Board of Registrars of Montgomery County in Alabama Supreme Court. Both Smith and the judges he faced were aware that the game being played out had little or nothing to do with words in Smith’s petition. Smith, as the judges knew, wanted the case removed to federal court, so he had included Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment grounds in his argument, while the judges wanted to avoid removal, and in fact to avoid ruling on the merits at all. So they dodged the issue by denying jurisdiction, ruling that Smith should have filed his suit in Montgomery city court, not at the state supreme court.
The last thing Smith wanted was to have the case plod its way through the Alabama judicial system. There was no chance of winning there, certainly not in any way that would alter the behavior of state officials, and a protracted process would be too costly to pursue. He wrote Washington that the ruling had been “purely political, with the sole purpose, in my opinion, to delay, and thus discourage the further effort to bring the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.”6 Still, he filed three separate lawsuits in city court, including one for monetary damages, in which he “included a thick stack of evidence, including convention speeches and newspaper articles, census tables, preliminary registration figures, and affidavits, which showed intent, opportunity, and discriminatory results. He was not asking to have the entire suffrage plan set aside, only those elements he believed had produced a discriminatory result. The registrars’ discretion was the real target here.”7 These were precisely the parameters under which the Supreme Court had invalidated the brick laundry law in Yick Wo, a precedent Smith would cite repeatedly, where the question of unbridled discretion had been the crux of the majority opinion.
With his city court filings likely to be beset by foot-dragging, and with funds tightening by the week, Smith also filed a separate action in federal court before Judge Jones. Although Jones had been willing to oppose his fellow delegates in the convention, he was now being asked to express that opposition in practical terms to the disadvantage of his fellow whites. Washington had hoped Jones would at some point be in this very position and that the combination of his own public statements and the fact that he owed a black man his seat on the federal bench would yield a favorable decision.
And, in what might have been a surprise, Washington got one.
Jones did not rule for Giles, nor did Smith and Washington intend him to. But he did agree to be party to a legally hazy agreement, dismissing the suit on jurisdictional grounds, thus allowing Smith to bypass circuit court and appeal directly to the Supreme Court. This required the attorney representing Alabama to cooperate as well, which he did, likely pleased to get the case out of Alabama and confident that nine white justices were not going to invalidate his state’s constitution.
And so, on February 24, 1903, Giles v. Harris was filed with the United States Supreme Court. In his brief, Wilford Smith presented the same overwhelming evidence as he had in the state action, demonstrating that discrimination against his client sprung directly from the 1901 Alabama Constitution—no matter how even-handedly it pretended to be worded—and therefore met all the requirements the Court had established to strike down a law as a violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
Smith wrote, “If the suffrage provisions of the constitution of Alabama bore equally upon the whites and blacks alike, no matter what the standard of property or education required might be, no cause of complaint would be urged here against them; but they sought to restrict the suffrage of the blacks without depriving a single white man of his right to vote.” Cognizant of the “political question” issue, he added, “This is not a suit brought to enforce a political right, but a civil right guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States. Nor is it sought in this action to control the exercise of any political functions of the State of Alabama.”8
Smith’s documentation was so persuasive that the attorney for Alabama, William Gunter Sr., did not contest it, but rather restricted himself to questions of jurisdiction. For this, he was forced to defend the Alabama Constitution as facially neutral, which was all the United States Constitution required, and avoid at all costs discussing how the provisions were implemented.
It cannot be said, that giving the privilege to soldiers and sailors and their descendants was a denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of color, race or previous condition of servitude . . . The objection, then, if any can be made, must rest on the third provision extending the privilege to all persons of good character understanding the duties and obligations of citizenship. It is evident that there can be no valid objection to the terms of this clause. It is clear that persons of the negro race may have in the highest degree good characters, and understand the duties and obligations of citizenship under a republican government, and thus that they are not excluded. On the other hand, it is equally obvious that white persons are liable to be excluded as not possessing these qualifications. Therefore, the clause is unobjectionable in its terms.9
Liberally citing Williams and Reese, and calling voter registration a “purely political function” and part of the “ordinary operations of government,” he asked that the suit be dismissed.
To anyone who thought that the law should actually apply to people it had been implemented to protect, the case could not have been clearer. Unless blacks indeed were lower on the evolutionary scale than whites—and Social Darwinists, of which there were many, believed just that—there could be no doubt that the new Alabama Constitution was being applied in a discriminatory fashion and that black American citizens were being denied the right to vote solely because of their race. One need look no further than the failure to deny discriminatory application by the defendant’s attorney. As such, whether or not voter registration was normally a political function was irrelevant. There was a constitutional amendment on the books that forbade such activity, whether political or not. In submitting such powerful documentation, Wilford Smith, who had assured Booker T. Washington that “the case would win itself,” seemed to have provided sufficient evidence to achieve that very outcome.
Only, of course, if five of the nine justices agreed, and the Court had undergone an important change since Williams. To replace Horace Gray, who had retired due to illness in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt had appointed to the high bench a man of towering reputation, a celebrated legal philosopher and former war hero, a man destined to become almost as famous as the court on which he served.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was born in Boston in March 1841. His father, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., was a famed physician, as well as a sparkling writer, poet, philosopher, and bestselling author. Among his closest friends were Emerson, Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell. He was one of the founders of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of ideas that survives to this day. The elder Holmes was known for rational thinking and deductive reasoning, and is generally thought to have lent his name to Arthur Conan Doyle, when Doyle was considering writing a series of detective stories.
It is rare that a son could outshine such a famed and celebrated father, but Holmes Jr. did. After fighting in some of the most famous battles of the Civil War, including Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, and Antietam—and being wounded three times—Holmes left the army and studied law at Harvard. (His father had studied law as well, but had never practiced.) While working as an attorney for fifteen years, Holmes wrote articles about the philosophy of law, some of which were published in a book, The Common Law, that is still read by law students more than 125 years later. He served on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as both associate and chief justice, all the while watching his reputation soar. His successor on the Supreme Court, Benjamin Cardozo, praised him as “probably the greatest legal intellect in the history of the English-speaking world.”
Holmes would serve on the Supreme Court for thirty years and, after his death in 1935, would be acclaimed in a best-selling biography, Yankee from Olympus, and become the subject of an Oscar-nominated film, The Magnificent Yankee (Louis Calhern lost for Best Actor to José Ferrer playing Cyrano de Bergerac). In another Oscar-winning film, Judgment at Nuremberg, the very film that was interrupted to show news reports of the violence in Selma, Holmes would be portrayed as the personification of American fairness.
To this day, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. is widely thought of as a great champion of civil liberties and an unwavering defender of democratic ideals.
If that were the Oliver Wendell Holmes who sat as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, he, along with Jackson Giles, Wilford Smith, and Booker T. Washington, might have changed the course of American history.
But Holmes was far more complex than Hollywood, flattering biographers, or even fellow justices portrayed. He was a committed Social Darwinist who believed in the superiority of the white race, and in religion his views were equally intolerant. In 1916, when Louis Brandeis was finally confirmed as an associate justice after a bitter floor fight in the Senate—the notion of a Jew on the Court disgusted many senators—Holmes observed that he would rather “see power in the hands of the Jews than the Catholics,” although he really did not “want to be run by either.”10 In 1927, he would write the notorious opinion in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the forced sterilization of a nineteen-year-old woman judged—incorrectly, as it turned out—to be mentally retarded. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” he wrote. Holmes was so obsessed with his image that, shortly before his death, he destroyed any personal papers that might reflect poorly on his reputation, retaining only those that painted him in a favorable light.
This was the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jackson Giles was up against.
Holmes had taken his seat in December 8, 1902, and Giles v. Harris would be his first major case. Chief Justice Melville Fuller chose him to write the opinion. On April 27, 1903, the case was decided. The vote was 6–3.
Holmes’s opinion was brief, only six pages. Bowing to the weight of Wilford Smith’s evidence, Holmes agreed that the voting rights provisions of the Alabama Constitution did indeed discriminate against the state’s black citizens. And Holmes was certainly cognizant of the application argument. “According to the allegations of the bill, this part of the constitution, as practically administered and as intended to be administered, let in all whites and kept out a large part, if not all, of the blacks, and those who were let in retained their right to vote after 1903, when tests which might be too severe for many of the whites as well as the blacks went into effect.”11
Nor would Alabama be able to sidestep judgment as South Carolina had in Mills v. Green. “The bill was filed in September, 1902, and alleged the plaintiff’s desire to vote at an election coming off in November. This election has gone by, so that it is impossible to give specific relief with regard to that. But we are not prepared to dismiss the bill or the appeal on that ground, because to be enabled to cast a vote in that election is not . . . the whole object of the bill. It is not even the principal object of the relief sought by the plaintiff. The principal object of that is to obtain the permanent advantages of registration as of a date before 1903.”
And finally, despite arguments to the contrary, Holmes ruled that no jurisdictional issue should prevent the Court from rendering judgment. “The plaintiff had the right to appeal directly to this Court . . . the case properly is here.”
For four of the six pages of his opinion, Holmes had written everything black Americans could have hoped for. But neither the Supreme Court of the United States nor Oliver Wendell Holmes personally had any intention of compelling Southern states to grant African Americans the right to vote, no matter what the Fifteenth Amendment said.
In the last two pages of his opinion, despite a mountain of unquestioned evidence, without mentioning or accounting for Yick Wo at all, Holmes denied Giles’s claim. More significant, however, were the ridiculous lengths to which he was forced to go to justify his judgment. Holmes’s reasoning was such a distortion of constitutional principles that legal scholar Richard Pildes called Giles v. Harris “the one key moment, one decisive turning point . . . in the bleak and unfamiliar saga . . . of the history of anti-democracy in the United States.”12
To begin with, Holmes acknowledged, “We cannot forget that we are dealing with a new and extraordinary situation.” And to deal with it, he claimed that since Giles insisted “the whole registration scheme of the Alabama Constitution is a fraud upon the Constitution of the United States, and asks us to declare it void,” Giles was suing to “to be registered as a party qualified under the void instrument.” If the Court then ruled in Giles’s favor, Holmes concluded, it would become “a party to the unlawful scheme by accepting it and adding another voter to its fraudulent lists.”
Holmes’s elaboration is almost comically circular:
If we accept the plaintiff’s allegations for the purposes of his case, he cannot complain. We must accept or reject them. It is impossible simply to shut our eyes, put the plaintiff on the lists, be they honest or fraudulent, and leave the determination of the fundamental question for the future. If we have an opinion that the bill is right on its face, or if we are undecided, we are not at liberty to assume it to be wrong for the purposes of decision. It seems to us that, unless we are prepared to say that it is wrong, that all its principal allegations are immaterial, and that the registration plan of the Alabama Constitution is valid, we cannot order the plaintiff’s name to be registered. It is not an answer to say that, if all the blacks who are qualified according to the letter of the instrument were registered, the fraud would be cured.
Leaving aside that if Giles and his fellow African Americans were indeed registered under the instrument, it would no longer be a “fraud,” by Holmes’s reasoning, any law that was discriminatory would be a fraud, and the Court would become party to that fraud by protecting the plaintiff’s right as a citizen. It would follow that the Supreme Court could never protect any citizen from any state law, which was precisely what the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments said the Court must do. Even using Joseph Bradley’s strangled view of the Fifteenth Amendment, here it was clear, as Holmes had admitted, that “citizens of the United States” were being denied the right to vote in Alabama “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
In addition, adding the Supreme Court’s imprimatur to a “fraudulent instrument” was not the Court’s only alternative. If he had chosen to, Holmes could simply have declared Sections 180 and 181 void, and any state provision that, in word or application, prevented equal access to the ballot box would also be void. Alabama would then have had the choice of either eliminating the offending provisions from its constitution, desisting in using them as a means to disfranchise black voters, or cease conducting elections for national office. (For statewide offices, Holmes was correct in his later assertion that the Court had no standing to enforce its ruling.)
If he had chosen this route, Holmes would hardly have been committing a judicial transgression. Justices dating from John Marshall had regularly voided specific sections of a law, as Marshall did with Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 in the case that established judicial review, Marbury v. Madison, while leaving the remainder intact. Holmes, however, did not mention that alternative at all.
Holmes’s second objection, that the Court “cannot undertake . . . to enforce political rights,” followed Melville Fuller’s lead in Mills v. Green and accepted Alabama’s ludicrous claim that the state had been conducting voter registration as a “purely political function.” As things stood, this would only have been the case if the systematic removal of its black citizens fell under the “political” umbrella. Here again, “political rights” proved to be one of those hazy concepts whose definition could change depending on who was doing the defining. But whatever position one takes on whether or not the Court should ensure political rights, or even what political rights are, Holmes’s reasoning was tortured and disingenuous:
The court has as little practical power to deal with the people of the state in a body. The bill imports that the great mass of the white population intends to keep the blacks from voting. To meet such an intent, something more than ordering the plaintiff’s name to be inscribed upon the lists of 1902 will be needed. If the conspiracy and the intent exist, a name on a piece of paper will not defeat them. Unless we are prepared to supervise the voting in that state by officers of the court, it seems to us that all that the plaintiff could get from equity would be an empty form. Apart from damages to the individual, relief from a great political wrong, if done, as alleged, by the people of a state and the state itself, must be given by them or by the legislative and political department of the government of the United States.
In other words, since the Court could not enforce its ruling, it should make no ruling at all.
But the Court has no power of enforcement for any ruling. It has no dedicated police force, no power over Congress. The Court gains its authority only from the willingness of the parties to adhere to its rulings and to the Constitution. If one of the parties refuses, force of arms, a tool of the other branches of government, may be used to ensure compliance. (As was the case sixty years later, when the government used federal troops and marshals to enforce school integration and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.)
And so, in a few paragraphs, Jackson Giles was turned away and the Alabama Constitution, created specifically to remove black Americans from the political process, was approved by the highest court in the land. Holmes’s opinion cut away the last hope citizens of color had of being able to have a voice in their government in the South. Previous court decisions had limited the reach of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to actions by a state, and then further restricted the amendments to actual state laws, rather than the actions of state employees. Now, it seemed, even state laws acknowledged to be discriminatory would be allowed to stand.
The decision was not unanimous. Justices Brown, Brewer, and Harlan dissented. Brown, who had authored the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, did not file an opinion, but later that year, he wrote, “In some criminal cases against negroes, coming up from the Southern States, we have adhered to the technicalities of the law so strictly that I fear injustice has been done to the defendant.”13
But ten years later, after he had left the bench, he also wrote,
There is a large class of people in our country who love change for the sake of change, or who think they may profit by it individually. These ideas are a perpetual source of trouble, but, of course, all wrong. There are always a few in the District who are clamoring for a change to a popular government, but the phantom of negro suffrage stands inexorably in their path. No suffrage without the nigger—no suffrage, no nigger.14
Harlan and Brewer did write opinions, each focusing more on the jurisdictional gymnastics by which the case came to the Court, and less on the merits. Still, Harlan wrote, “To avoid misapprehension, I may add that my conviction is that, upon the facts alleged in the bill . . . the plaintiff is entitled to relief in respect of his right to be registered as a voter.”
Brewer’s dissent was more substantive. He stated plainly, “The plaintiff was entitled to a place on the permanent registry, and was denied it by the defendants, the board of registrars in the county in which he lived.”
As to Holmes’s contention that Giles’s disfranchisement could only be reversed in the legislature, Brewer replied,
Neither can I assent to the proposition that the case presented by the plaintiff’s bill is not strictly a legal one, and entitling a party to a judicial hearing and decision. He alleges that he is a citizen of Alabama, entitled to vote; that he desired to vote at an election for representative in Congress; that, without registration, he could not vote, and that registration was wrongfully denied him by the defendants. That many others were similarly treated does not destroy his rights or deprive him of relief in the courts. That such relief will be given has been again and again affirmed in both national and state courts.15
Holmes’s opinion, as with many of the equal rights decisions, passed into American jurisprudence largely without comment. For decades, neither politicians, legal scholars, nor journalists expressed indignation or rebuke.16 No one in the white mainstream seemed to notice or care that Holmes had, as had Justices Bradley, Field, Brown, and others before him, simply aligned the law with his own belief in white racial superiority.17 A Holmes biographer wrote, “As for race . . . Holmes’ opinions were not only driven into intolerance by his social Darwinism, but were driven beyond the general intolerance of the age.”18
But Holmes was just one of many Supreme Court justices who abdicated their responsibility to protect an abused class of citizens simply because they seemed to decide that those citizens did not deserve protection. Further, if the Constitution seemed to disagree, then the Constitution must somehow be wrong. In the end, what is most sad is that Giles v. Harris was in no way an exception in the Supreme Court’s commitment to allowing—even encouraging—voting rolls to remain white. Rather, the decision is remarkable precisely because it was so unremarkable.19