Collection: Chandler Davidson Texas Politics research collection
Interviewee: Chandler Davidson
Interviewer: Chandler Davidson (Questions provided by "Al")
Date: Unknown
Transcribed by: Gabby Parker

Dr. Chandler Davidson (Expert Witness for Al)


Chandler Davidson: Is there a history of racial division in Texas? That's the first question. The answer to it is, yes, there is. Uh, we have an overwhelming amount of documentation  in this area, going all the way back to the existence of the slave market in the city of Houston in the early days to the, uh, race riots of 1866 and 1917, uh TSU Rebellion as it's sometimes called, in 1967. Uh, the uh...looting, and rioting in the uh... late 1960s as a result of racial tensions. The statistics on lynching in East Texas and in Harris county. The existence of Jim Crow laws in the city, throughout most of the 20th century, including laws which were officially sanctioned by the city of Houston. [Tape skips]


CD: Does bloc voting exist in Houston elections? The answer to this is that, this is certainly the case, has been, in recent years, in the elections that I have analyzed involving black candidates. Uh, and here, one must simply look at the percentage of the vote going to the black candidate from the black precincts, and the percentage going to the black candidate from the white precincts.


CD: Question three: How successful have minority candidates been in getting elected to the city council? The answer here is provided in the form of a box score. Three positions that have been available between 1955 and 1975 have been filled by a single minority person. At this point, one can also look at the percentages which minorities, um, have achieved in running for the city council. And uh, I introduce at this point a bar graph, which gives information about...at this point, Al, the 32 black and mexican-american candidacies for the city council between 1959 (when the first minority member ran for the city council, during the time period in question), and 1975. And, this graph will show that the average percentage of the total vote obtained by the minority candidates was around 30--31 percent, and that includes those candidacies of Judson Robinson's, including one in which he obtained 100%, by virtue of not being opposed.


CD: What are the reasons for this poor batting average? Well, it seems to me that there are two factors--two central factors that are involved. On the one hand, there is the tradition of prejudice in Houston, which I alluded to earlier, which is a matter of historical record. And uh...that prejudice, by the way, still exists according to a study by a Dr. Charles Gateson--he made, of data collected for the city of Houston in 1969, which showed that there was still a sizeable amount of intolerance toward both blacks and mexican-americans expressed by white anglos living in Houston.


CD: Under uh... uh, uh Al-under 4a2 here, you have politically decisive issues. I think what you meant here is politically divisive issues. Uh, that is to say, it's both a question of...prejudice on the part of whites, and it's also the salience in certain times of elections of racial issues. And of course, the most obvious kind of election, in which the racial issue obtrudes is that in which the um, the candidates in the race are of two different races.


CD: Question: What is the other major factor which accounts for this poor batting average? Answer: A set of electoral rules which make it extremely difficult for minorities to get elected in council races.


CD: Question: What are these? Answer: The Majority requirement, Place voting, and Election from the district at large.


CD: And...Question: How do each of these devices affect the chances of a minority person's getting elected? Answer: So far as the...majority requirement is concerned, it simply means that minorities have to obtain a larger percentage of the vote, generally speaking, than would be required if a plurality requirement were in effect. And as you remember, the plurality requirement was in effect--was in effect in Houston City elections prior to 1955.


CD: Question: Have there been any cases...between 1955 and 1975...in which a minority candidate would have been elected to office, if the majority requirement had not been in effect? Yes, there are two cases--this is the answer. Yes, there are two cases. One involves the contest involving Reverend E.V. Hill in 1959, a black minister who received a plurality of the vote in the November election. However, when he was forced into a runoff with a single white opponent, he was unable to obtain a majority. The other case is of precisely the same sort. It involved Dr. C.W. Thompson in 1963, who in his first race obtained a plurality, but not a majority, and in the runoff, he too was defeated. And then...Al, if you wish, I can go into the situation on the Houston Independent school board, pointing out that Mrs. White, who was elected at large to the board of trustees in 1958, and again in 1962, did so only by virtue of the fact that the majority requirement was not in effect. --In neither of those two races did she obtain a majority of the vote. And the same is true for, uh, the third slot on the Houston school board, filled by a black in those times, Asbury Butler. The effect of the majority requirement in School Board elections, which was instituted after two blacks had been elected to the board under the plurality rule, were quite obvious. In Mrs. White's 1966-1967 race, in facing a single white opponent, she was soundly defeated.


CD: Question: What about the device of Place Voting? Answer: Place voting is a system which renders impossible the practice of what is called bullet-voting, or single-shot voting, which, in a system where blacks constitute a minority and where place voting is not in effect, they are sometimes able through a special strategy, to elect at least one of their own into office. And at this point--it depends, Al, on how you feel about this, we can uh...we can illustrate the effect--we can illustrate the strategy of place voting with a chart. I assume that the judge will be familiar with it, and if you wish, we don't need to actually go into that chart unless someone, unless someone asks us to.


CD: Question: Could this bullet strategy have been employed by minority groups in Houston prior to 1955, as the system was then constructed? Answer: Yes, in my opinion, it could have been, by virtue of the fact that the three at-large positions on the city council were not elected under the play system.


CD: Question: And how does the at-large system burden the typical minority candidate? Answer: By diluting the minority vote.


CD: Question: And what, in you reason--and what, in your opinion, is the reason for this? Answer: There is a vast scholarly literature on the effects of at-large voting, which goes back at least to...the Okeis Monumental Study of Southern Politics, indicating that in constituencies containing a black minority, at-large voting simply makes it more difficult that it would be through, under the single-member district plan for blacks to achieve either a plurality or a majority of the vote against white opponents. The scholarly literature on this issue is virtually unanimous.


CD: What evidence do you have of the dilution effects of at-large voting? Answer: Well...in combination with the other two hindrances that I have mentioned, the evidence lies in the "scorecard"--the batting average of minority candidacies, which I mentioned earlier. The fact that over a 20-year period in a city, which during that time can conservatively be estimated to have contained 25 percent minorities, only 3 out of 88 positions available have been filled by those minorities. Even, in spite of the fact that there were over 30 candidacies for those offices.


CD: Would that small number--3 out of 88--be very likely to occur by chance? That is to say, could that result, simply by chance as opposed to a causal connection between the electoral system and the political outcomes? Answer: The chances of that are very small. As I have calculated it, only 1 in several million.


CD: Question: How specifically does the at-large system in Houston make it more difficult for minority candidates to win? Answer: Well, there are two very important reasons--One being, the large population that an aspiring candidate must reach and attempt to convince of the merits of his candidacy, and the second, the vast geographical area that a candidate must effectively cover.


CD: Question: Is the population in Houston exceptionally large for an aspiring council candidate to reach? Answer: It is extremely large. And then, I will go into some of the details of the population size of Houston, and its minority population.


CD: Question: And is the geographical area of Houston exceptionally large? As a constituency for a city council member? Answer: It is extremely large. And there, again, I will go into the facts of the land area contained in Houston, and even that land area contained in an average-sized city council district.


CD: Question: To run an effective campaign that involves reaching such a large number of individuals and covering such a large territory, do you think money is an important factor for the aspiring candidate? Answer: Especially so if that candidate is a member of a minority group. An effective shoe-leather campaign is virtually precluded by a population the size of the Houston constituency, and by a land area which is half the size of the state of Rhode Island. 


CD: Al, on uh, on this, the next question is, uh "What, in your opinion, or to your knowledge, are the typical Council expenditures?" Well, at present, I don't have any uh...figures available on that, and I don't know whether it's worth, uh, going into the actual data here. Uh, that's up to you. If you want to ask questions along these lines, I suggest they take the following form: "In your opinion, does it take a great deal of money to um...win a typical city council race?" Answer: Well, sir, in order to challenge an incumbent and successfully defeat him, I think it would take a good deal of money, although we have had so few cases in Houston of an incumbent being successfully challenged that I doubt if we have reliable data on uh...on the necessary expenditures in those cases. I do know that that the uh, few careful studies that have been made recently of expenditures in single-member districts, in Harris county's legislative districts, reveals a relatively small expenditure per candidate, somewhere around 8,000 dollars.


CD: Question: You speak of defeating incumbent candidates. Has the incumbency of white candidates, in your opinion, also proved a burden to minorities getting elected to office? Answer: Indeed, it has, and I would like to show the court at this point a chart I have prepared indicating the number of positions over the 20-year period in question that have been filled by incumbent council members. And the findings are that two-thirds of these positions have been filled by incumbents and--in all cases but two, those incumbents have been white incumbents.


CD: Question: Do you feel it is especially difficult for an incumbent, as opposed to a non-incumbent, to be defeated? Answer: I do. And again, the scholarly literature on the effects of incumbency are virtually unanimous. I have surveyed studies that have been carried out on the effects of incumbency in congressional races, in senate races, in state-wide election races. An inference can clearly be made to city races, showing that incumbency provides tremendous benefits. The name identification, the free publicity. The advantages and prerequisites of office that are all connected with incumbency, in money terms, amount to a sizable amount of campaign expenditures.


CD: Question: In your opinion, would single-member districts provide a remedy for the inadequate representation of minorities on city council. Answer: Yes, it would.


CD: Question: What evidence do you have for this? Answer: The most convincing evidence is a comparison--a before and after comparison, if you will, of the success of minorities in various Harris county constituencies when the at-large requirement was in effect, and when single-member districts were instituted.


CD: Question: And what are some of these instances? Answer: One of the most obvious, I think, in the case of the Harris county legislative delegation to the state house of representatives. In the period between 1956, and 1970, a relatively minute proportion of the total seats available went to minorities, although approximately 20 percent of the county's population is comprised of minorities. Immediately after the institution of single-member districts in 1972, the percentage of minorities going to the state legislature from Harris county shot up to around 25 percent, 20 to 25 percent of all available positions.


CD: Are there any other instances of the effectiveness of single-member districts. Yes, one of the most remarkable is the case of the state senatorial districts. Prior to 1966, the state senators were elected at-large, and no minority was ever elected in this century to the state senate under those conditions. When the districts were withdr--redrawn, in 1966, the single-member districts, state senator Barbara Jordan was elected, and served between 1966 and 1972. And in the case of Mrs. Jordan, we also have the very germane example of the redistricting of congressional districts which, prior to 1972, were the functional equivalents of at-large districts. And after 1972, were drawn in such a way that a sizable minority of one district contained blacks. In that case, Mrs. Jordan was elected to the United States congress, and was the first black ever to be elected to congress from the Harris county congressional delegation.


CD: Are there any other cases that you think are instructive? Answer: Yes, the Harris county Democratic Executive Committee, which has been a single-member district system since the Smith vs. Alright decision in 1944. Black and Mexican-American representation on the executive committee has increased steadily throughout the 1950s and 1960s.


CD: Note: Al, I don't know what to do about the um, Houston Independent School District at this point--we had decided earlier that uh, we probably should not bring it in, hammering home the fact that we're talking about council elections, rather than other sorts of elections, uhh... seems rather odd now, in that light, to bring it in under the questions of single-member districts as a remedy, because um...we really don't have much evidence on the effects of single member districts, uh... of the single-member districting so far as H.I.S.D is concerned, and as much as we even, we haven't even had a, a full panel of trustees elected under the system, so, I'm suggesting that we leave it out at this point, by the same token inasmuch as the other side has seen fit to bring it up as an example of the ease with which minorities can get elected under an at-large scheme. It seems as though we ought to bring the case in somewhere along the line--I did mention it earlier when I was discussing the plurality requirement and its relationship to Mrs. White's and Asbury Butler's races in 1958, '62, and '64. Perhaps the logical place to bring it back in again would have been under section Roman numeral 4b3, where we're talking about the at-large device, and I could say at some point along the way, or you could ask me "In your opinion, has the at-large requirement in the Houston Independent School District been a help of a hindrance to minorities elected to the board of trustees," and I would answer "No, I do not think that it has been a help, it's certainly been a hindrance, however there were special circumstances operating in the Houston Independent School District which, to some extent ameliorated the influence of the at-large device. One of them, as I have already mentioned, is the plurality, rather than the majority requirement, and the second is Slating, which uh, existed roughly between 1967 and 1972, and did--to some extent, offset the extreme disadvantages of the at large election." and Then you could say "And, has slating offset the disadvantage of the at-large requirement in the city of Houston?" Answer: No, it has not. Because of the special nature of Houston politics, there has been no successful attempt to institute a slate, and parenthetically here under the charter amendments of 1955, um, a slate must consist of 9 candidates--that is to say a mayor, and 8 councilmen. It's not possible to have a partial slate, one has to have an entire nine member slate here. Um...and, and that requirement along with the special nature of the city's political system makes it extremely unlikely that uh...a slating arrangement of the kind that uh...virtually exists in Democratic primary races and in um, November general elections for uh, partisan offices--or that existed briefly, and finally fell apart in the Houston Independent School District makes it, it makes it virtually impossible, uh... for such a slating arrangement to actually come into being and provide some sort of remedy for the at-large requirement.


CD: Okay, then back finally to the recap. Question: To recapitulate, then, Dr. Davidson, is it your opinion that the polarization--the racial polarization in the Houston Community, combined with the electoral rules in effect since 1955, have made it extremely difficult for blacks and minorities to get elected under the at-large system? And the answer: Yes, I do. I think, any one of these burdens presents formidable difficulties to blacks getting elected to office, and the three of them combined make it extremely difficult for minor--for minorities to gain office at the city council level. In this respect, once again, the facts speak for themselves--only 3 positions out of 88 filled by minorities within this 20-year time span, despite the fact that a sizable number of minority candidates have run for the city council. With the exception of Mr. Judson Robinson, no minority candidate has ever obtained more than 40 percent of the total vote.