“ The Constitution has not withdrawn the administration of criminal justice, of which the jury system is a part, from the States. It does command that no State purposefully make jury service turn on color. ”

“ With the large number of colored male residents of the county who are literate, and in the absence of any countervailing testimony, there is no room for inference that there are not among them householders of good moral character, who can read and write, qualified and available for grand jury service.' The existence of the kind of discrimination described in the Hill case does not depend upon systematic exclusion continuing over a long period and practiced by a succession of jury commissioners. ”

“ Proportional racial limitation is therefore forbidden. An accused is entitled to have charges against him considered by a jury in the selection of which there has been neither inclusion nor exclusion because of race.
Our holding that there was discrimination in the selection of grand jurors in this case, however, is based on another ground. In explaining the fact that no Negroes appeared on this grand-jury list, the commissioners said that they knew none available who qualified; at the same time they said they chose jurymen only from those people with whom they were personally acquainted. ”

“ Petitioner's attack is upon the way the statutory method of grand-jury selection has been administered by the jury commissioners. [7] One charge is that discrimination must have been practiced because the Negro proportion of grand jurors is less than the Negro proportion of the county's population. Under the 1940 census the total population of Dallas County was 398,564, of whom 61,605 were Negroes. ”

“ The record does disclose stark facts requiring reversal on a very different basis. If one factor is uniform in a continuing series of events that are brought to pass through human intervention, the law would have to have the blindness of indifference rather than the blindness of impartiality not to attribute the uniform factor to man's purpose. ”

“ This is about 15.5%. In weighing this matter of custom, we limit ourselves, as do the parties, to the period between June 1, 1942, when Hill v. Texas, supra, was decided, and November 1947, when petitioner was indicted. There were 21 grand juries in this period; of the 252 members of the panels, [9] 17, or 6.7% were Negroes. But this apparent discrepancy may be explained by the fact that Texas grand jurors must possess certain statutory qualifications. ”

“ The testimony and the statistics in the briefs cause us to conclude that the figure refers to all eligible Negro voters.↑ Texas Almanac, 1947-1948, p. 421.↑ In our computations we have used statistics which include both men and women, because in many cases statistical breakdowns in terms of sex are not available. Although only men may serve on the grand juries, the use of totals including both sexes should make for only minor variations in the percentages.↑ Compare Norris v. ”

“ On each of these twenty-one consecutive panels there was never more than one Negro. This selection was made from lists which were not the result of a drawing of lots but the personal choice of the grand-jury commissioners. The available evidence clearly indicates that no more than one Negro was chosen by the commissioners for each of the twenty-one lists. Only one Negro was placed on the list-he did not serve on the panel-for the second grand jury in Dallas County after the decision in Hill v. ”