Summary

Portrait of Hugo Black Hugo Black Smith v. Texas (311 U.S. 128)…

What the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits is racial discrimination in the selection of grand juries. Where jury commissioners limit those from whom grand juries are selected to their own personal acquaintance, discrimination can arise from commissioners who know no negroes as well as from commissioners who know but eliminate them. If there has been discrimination, whether accomplished ingeniously or ingenuously, the conviction cannot stand.
Source: Wikisource

Portrait of Hugo Black Hugo Black Smith v. Texas (311 U.S. 128)…

It is part of the established tradition in the use of juries as instruments of public justice that the jury be a body truly representative of the community. For racial discrimination to result in the exclusion from jury service of otherwise qualified groups not only violates our Constitution and the laws enacted under it [4] but is at war with our basic concepts of a democratic society and a representative government.
Source: Wikisource

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