Fifteenth Amendment

Fifteenth Amendment, amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States that guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The amendment complemented and followed in the wake of the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments, which abolished slavery and guaranteed citizenship, respectively, to African Americans. The passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and its subsequent ratification (February 3, 1870) effectively enfranchised African American men while denying the right to vote to women of all colours. Women would not receive that right until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

The full text of the Fifteenth Amendment is:

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The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude—

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

After the Civil War, during the period known as Reconstruction (1865–77), the amendment was successful in encouraging African Americans to vote. Many African Americans were even elected to public office during the 1880s in the states that formerly had constituted the Confederate States of America. By the 1890s, however, efforts by several states to enact such measures as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses—in addition to widespread threats and violence—had completely reversed those trends. By the beginning of the 20th century, nearly all African Americans in the states of the former Confederacy were again disenfranchised.

Poll taxes in federal elections were abolished by the Twenty-fourth Amendment (1964), and in 1966 the Supreme Court extended that ban to state and local elections. The Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965 abolished prerequisites to registration and voting and also allowed for federal “preclearance” of changes in election laws in certain (“covered”) jurisdictions, including nine mostly Southern states. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), however, the Supreme Court struck down the section of the VRA that had been used to identify covered jurisdictions, effectively making the preclearance requirement unenforceable.