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El Paso Branch National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Unit 6175.
The NAACP El Paso Branch holds monthly meetings on the 3rd Saturday at 1 PM at 3400 Wyoming Avenue. We welcome and encourage everyone to join us and contribute positively to our community.
We envision an inclusive community rooted in liberation where all persons can exercise their civil and human rights without discrimination.
Our mission is to achieve equity, political rights, and social inclusion by advancing policies and practices that expand human and civil rights, eliminate discrimination, and accelerate the well-being, education, and economic security of Black people and all persons of color.
We are committed to a world without racism where Black people enjoy equitable opportunities in thriving communities. Our work is rooted in racial equity, civic engagement, and supportive policies and institutions for all marginalized people.
The first branch of the NAACP in Texas was established in El Paso in 1914.
The founding of this unit cannot be told without the relating of the life of its most noted chartering member, Dr. L.A. Nixon Lawrence Aaron Nixon, black physician and voting-rights advocate, was born in Marshall, Texas, on February 7th or 9th, 1884, the son of Charles and Jennie (Engledow) Nixon. He attended Wiley College in Marshall and received his M.D. degree in 1906 from Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tennessee.
He began practice in Cameron, Milam County, Texas. In 1909 there were ten lynchings of black men in Texas, one of which occurred in Cameron on November 4th and influenced Dr.Nixon to become a civil-rights advocate. In December he moved to El Paso. There he established a successful medical practice, helped organize a Methodist congregation, voted in Democratic primary and general elections, and in 1910 helped to organize the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In 1924, NAACP Field Secretary William Pickens visited El Paso and announced that the NAACP intended to test the constitutionality of the Terrell Law. The Terrell Law was passed in 1923 by the Texas Legislature which stated “In no event shall a Negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary election in Texas.” On July 26, 1924, with the sponsorship of the NAACP, Dr.Nixon took his poll-tax receipt to a Democratic primary polling place and was refused a ballot. Thus began a twenty-year struggle in which Dr.Nixon and his El Paso attorney, Fred C. Knollenberg, twice carried their case to the United States Supreme Court.
In 1927, in Nixon v. Herndon, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision that Dr. Nixon had been unlawfully deprived of his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1932 Justice Benjamin Cardozo ruled for Dr.Nixon again, in Nixon v. Condon, holding that political parties are “custodians of official power … the instruments by which government becomes a living thing.” The Nixon cases were major steps toward voting rights, but there were legal loopholes under which the state and the Democratic Party continued to deny primary votes to blacks. It was not until the decision in Smith v. Allwright ended the white primary that the way was cleared, and on July 22, 1944, Dr. and Mrs. Nixon walked into the same El Paso voting place and voted in a Democratic primary. Lawrence Nixon was married first to Esther Calvin, who died in 1918, and then in 1935 to Drusilla Tandy Porter, who survived him. He had four children. Nixon died on March 6, 1966, as a result of an automobile accident.
