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“I’ve Got to Try”
When Dr. Lawrence Aaron Nixon walked into the fire station to cast his ballot in the Democratic primary, he knew full well what he was up against.
After all, this was July 1924—and he was a Black man in Texas, a state where people who looked like him were not supposed to be able to vote.
The year before, free from any federal voting rights protections thanks to the defeat of the 1890 Federal Elections Bill, the Texas legislature had passed Senate Bill 44, which read:
In no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary election held in the State of Texas, and should a negro vote in a Democratic primary election, such ballot shall be void, and election officials are herein directed to throw out such a ballot and not count the same.
During this time, and through most of the twentieth century, the Democratic primary was the only meaningful election in the state. Nominally, a Republican Party in Texas had existed, but it was so anemic that it could barely function. This meant that Texas was essentially a single-party state under control of the Democrats, so if you were prevented from voting in the party’s primary—as was now the case for every Black Texan—you had no say in who would represent you in government.
The “white primary law” was intended to codify in statute what had been practiced informally across much of the state for the last three decades: whites would control political power in Texas.
El Paso, where Nixon lived, was not free of the kind of discrimination that led to these practices. For decades, Black El Pasoans had been limited in where they could live, where they could sit on streetcars or in movie theaters, and where they could receive services. (“I Don’t Work for Negroes,” wrote one dentist advertising in the El Paso Herald.)
Still, compared to much of the rest of Texas—especially Marshall, where Nixon had grown up—El Paso had historically been much more welcoming of Black Americans.
That relative tolerance might have been what attracted Dr. Nixon to the border town in the first place.
After growing up in deep East Texas and living briefly in the central part of the state, he packed up his belongings, boarded a train, and made his way to West Texas in 1910.
But the El Paso that greeted Lawrence Nixon when he arrived at the Union Depot in January of that year was completely different from the El Paso he’d briefly visited as a child, then a small outpost at the edge of Texas. Twenty years later, it was a thriving, growing community, a place that was essential to anyone doing anything of any significance in the American Southwest.
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The train station itself was a celebrated local landmark. Completed four years before Nixon’s arrival, it was designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham in neoclassical style. Sunlight poured through the high Diocletian windows onto a pristine marble floor and lit up the symmetrical pillars and detailed architectural ornaments that would have made a third-century Roman citizen as proud as it did the El Pasoans of the twentieth. A Harvey House restaurant served fresh seafood and raw oysters delivered by rail from the coasts. It was clear that El Paso considered itself a leading American city and was taking the steps necessary to realize that ambition.
It was no accident that the city fathers chose Burnham to design this prominent landmark in the tradition of great public spaces that recalled the height of the Roman Empire. “Make no little plans,” Burnham had said. “They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized.”
Burnham’s counsel was the prevailing wisdom of the day: dream big enough and anything is possible.
The year before Nixon’s arrival, President William Howard Taft had arrived at the same Union Depot to meet with his Mexican counterpart, Porfirio Díaz, at the El Paso Chamber of Commerce, the first-ever summit between leaders from the two countries. Though Chihuahua governor Enrique Creel officially served as the meeting’s interpreter, the two presidents were able to speak each other’s native tongue well enough to understand the other. All went remarkably well until President Taft’s chair collapsed under his weight at the end of the meeting.
Within a year of the first U.S.-Mexico summit, a prosperous Mexican landowner named Francisco Madero would challenge Díaz in that country’s national election. Defeated in what turned out to be a heavily rigged contest, and jailed for good measure, Madero escaped Mexico and came to El Paso, setting up the provisional headquarters of the Mexican revolutionary forces only blocks away from the Union Depot.
Within months, he would defeat Díaz’s government army in the battle for Ciudad Juárez, and by 1911, he was sitting in the president’s chair in Mexico City.
In this way, El Paso had already borne witness to one revolution against a rigged democracy by the time Nixon had moved there—and the ground was fertile for another one.
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As the only all-weather pass through the Rocky Mountains, the biggest U.S. city on the border with Mexico, and the center of commerce in the greater Southwest, El Paso played an outsized role in the American West.
Two years after his visit to El Paso, and only months after the Battle of Juárez, President Taft signed legislation that would make the territories of New Mexico and Arizona the next two states admitted to the Union. The plan was to hold an initial statehood convention and celebratory jubilee for the two new states, but there was no city in either territory large enough to host these events. So a competition was launched among the significant cities of the West for the honor, with El Paso ultimately beating out Los Angeles.
In October 1911, the city hosted the new governors of Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the governors of Texas, Chihuahua, and Sonora, for a weeklong celebration, the likes of which had never been seen in the western states. The members of the various delegations whooped it up in an unending series of banquets, parades, dances, and balls. A baseball tournament between the five states was held, with El Paso fielding its own team. In a sign of how seriously they took the competition, El Paso recruited Chick Brandom, who had helped the Pittsburgh Pirates win the World Series in 1908, to pitch for their side.
This was the kind of enterprising, creative, and proudly binational city that Lawrence Nixon stepped into when he stepped off that train in January 1910. It couldn’t have been more different from his hometown of Marshall or the other Southern cities in which he’d lived. It was aspirational, wildly ambitious, and brand-new. It wasn’t yet set or defined. The lines between countries and cultures blurred. Opportunity abounded, and not only for white men.
That marked a stark contrast from the city Nixon had previously called home: Cameron, Texas. Located in East-Central Texas between Austin and Waco, Cameron had been a shot in the dark for Nixon, who was encouraged to move there sight unseen by a good friend after Nixon graduated from medical school in 1906. He soon despaired of his decision, writing that he had “never before seen [Black] people living in such wretched surroundings.”
His misgivings were confirmed the next year when he witnessed the lynching of Alex Johnson, a Black man accused of attacking a white girl. More than five hundred people showed up to witness the hanging, and though Nixon was safely behind the doors of his medical office, he could still hear Johnson’s cries. There would be another lynching of a Black man, Coke Mills, a little more than a dozen miles outside of Cameron in 1909, just weeks before Nixon left for El Paso.
El Paso was a new, growing city firmly focused on the future. It was oriented toward the West, not the South, and it was closer to the state capitals of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Chihuahua than it was to Austin. It was as far away from Marshall and Cameron and other Texas redoubts of Confederate resentment as you could get without leaving the state.
It also had Ciudad Juárez, across the river, where Black Americans had more rights than in their home country.
As Langston Hughes wrote when he visited the two communities in the 1930s, “It was strange to find that just by stepping across an invisible line into Mexico, a Negro could buy a beer in any bar, sit anywhere in the movies, or eat in any restaurant, so suddenly did Jim Crow disappear, and Americans visiting Juárez, who would not drink beside a Negro in Texas, did so in Mexico.”
If the twin sister cities of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez—united, not divided, by the Rio Grande—were about new beginnings, new starts, new creation, then Nixon was going to take full advantage of it. Confirming that he was finally in the right place, Nixon sent for his young wife, Esther, and their one-year-old son, Lawrence Joseph, to join him in El Paso. He set up his medical practice and quickly became engaged in the civic life of the community.
He helped organize a Methodist congregation, voted in the Democratic primary and the November general election, and in 1913, he joined other Black El Pasoans in creating the El Paso Lyceum and Civic Improvement Association. After petitioning the NAACP to charter a branch in El Paso, by the summer of 1914, the El Paso Lyceum became the first NAACP chapter in the state.
Nixon was elected as the new organization’s first executive committee chairman and helped focus the group’s efforts on Jim Crow practices that circumscribed life for the African American community and produced daily humiliations, like the time Nixon and his son were booted from their seats at the circus for sitting too close to the show and ushered into the far back of the tent with the other Black patrons.
Though denied equal treatment under the law and faced with the indignity of Jim Crow, Nixon had found a home in El Paso. The challenges of discrimination produced a drive for action and justice within him that might have been fatal in other parts of the state, certainly in Marshall and Cameron.
He also fell in love with a culture that was different from anything he’d yet experienced. Setting up his residence and practice in the Mexican American immigrant neighborhood of Segundo Barrio, Nixon quickly learned Spanish and saw primarily Black and Mexican American patients.
Segundo Barrio was at that time, as it still is today, a neighborhood of immigrants from Mexico and Latin America. Some refer to it as “The Ellis Island of the Americas,” in part because so many American families can trace their roots back to this historic neighborhood that has two international bridges connecting it to Ciudad Juárez. Those who lived in Segundo Barrio when the Nixon family arrived would have largely been the lowest-wage laborers and craftsmen, who with their families lived in sprawling tenements not subject to traditional city code enforcement, like the Seis Infiernos (or “Six Hells”) tenements on South Ochoa Street.
But Segundo Barrio was also home to artists, educators, doctors, revolutionaries, poets, and historians. Mariano Azuelo wrote the story of Mexican revolutionaries in a series of pamphlets inserted into the El Paso del Norte newspaper in an apartment just blocks from Nixon’s medical office. Those inserts were later collected and published as Los de abajo (sometimes translated into English as The Underdogs), which became the novel of the Mexican Revolution.
And as much as it was defined by the Mexican immigrant experience, Segundo Barrio was also home to a number of African Americans, including the Nixon family, especially since Jim Crow limited the neighborhoods where they could live. Henry Flipper, who had been born enslaved and rose to become the first African American graduate of West Point, called the corner of Third and Oregon in Segundo Barrio home for a while.
In other words, Segundo Barrio (literally, “Second Ward”) was a neighborhood of people who, though limited by custom and law to second-class status in the wider city despite their talent, accomplishments, and potential, were nevertheless able to contribute to the success of the community and the country.
But its second-class status meant that it also received the scarcest of resources and the least amount of positive government attention, and bore the brunt of the toughest challenges facing the city as a whole. When the global flu pandemic of 1918 came to El Paso, it hit Segundo Barrio especially hard, taking Nixon’s wife the following year, but sparing his young son. As was the practice at the time, family members cared for his child. Now alone, and grieving, Nixon poured his energies into political action, before eventually remarrying, to a fellow activist named Drusilla Tandy Porter.
Together, according to Will Guzmán, who wrote the definitive biography of Nixon, Lawrence and Drusilla would spend decades “building organizations for various social justice causes including access to the ballot, eliminating the poll tax, exposing structural racism, and challenging Jane and Jim Crow.”
They would eventually move closer to the all-Black Douglass School, in the nearby Magoffin neighborhood. But the community of underdogs and immigrants in Segundo Barrio who first welcomed Dr. Nixon would undoubtedly influence him for the remainder of his life.
In his new practice at the corner of Willow and Myrtle—in a neighborhood of mixed industrial, retail, and residential buildings—Nixon further rose as a community leader. Whether it was serving in his church, leading the NAACP, or working with the city government to construct a swimming pool for Black children, Nixon embraced the opportunity to serve. Along with practicing medicine and caring for his patients, civic engagement became central to his purpose in life.
And so it must have come as a rude shock to him following the adoption of the white primary law by the Texas legislature in 1923 that, after more than a decade of dedication to the public life of this burgeoning, ambitious community, he would no longer be able to vote in Texas elections.
As if unable to accept this injustice and too set in his path of civic involvement, Nixon still paid his annual poll tax in January 1924. He also continued to negotiate with El Paso’s newly elected mayor on the funding and location for the public swimming pool that would serve Black El Pasoans. And he voted in the May bond election that year to help ensure its passage. (This was only possible because it was a municipal, nonpartisan race, and therefore wasn’t subject to the white primary law.)
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Nixon, William Pickens, the national field secretary, was looking for someone to challenge the new Texas voting law in court. While other states had worked to prevent African Americans from voting, none but Texas had taken the extreme measure of enshrining the prohibition in statute.
The ideal candidate for the suit had to meet a narrow set of conditions: they had to be a Black voter who had paid their poll tax; they had to be a consistently registered Democrat; and, most important, as Pickens put it, “we are looking for someone who is not afraid.”
Of all the possible Black voters in Texas, he chose Nixon, who fit the bill as perfectly as could have been hoped.
Nixon readily accepted the challenge to become the lead plaintiff in fighting the white primary law, perhaps not knowing the difficulty and duration of the battle before him.
And so, on the morning of July 26, 1924, Nixon walked the three blocks to his normal polling location, Fire Station No. 5 on Texas Avenue, to try to vote in the Democratic primary. There, he was greeted by the election judges, Champ Herndon and Charles Porras, both of whom he would have called his friends.
They made polite small talk, asking about each other’s health. This must have been a familiar routine, given the number of elections in which Nixon had voted at this same location.
And then Nixon displayed his poll tax receipt in order to vote. The tone of the conversation changed, and one of the judges painfully told him, “Dr. Nixon, you know we can’t let you vote.”
“I know you can’t,” he answered. “But I’ve got to try.”
Copyright © 2022 by Beto O’Rourke
