The Fifteenth Amendment

The Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery. The Fourteenth granted citizenship and required equal protection. The Fifteenth, ratified in February 1870, addressed the franchise. Its central provision reads: "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." Section 2 gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.

The immediate effect was significant. Hundreds of thousands of Black men registered to vote in the former Confederate states. Black candidates won seats in Congress, state legislatures, and local offices throughout the South during the Reconstruction years. That progress was systematically dismantled after federal troops withdrew in 1877. Southern states erected an elaborate machinery of disenfranchisement, including literacy tests, poll taxes, white primaries, grandfather clauses, and outright intimidation. By the early twentieth century, Black voter registration in much of the South had fallen to a few percent. The amendment's guarantee was, in practice, nullified.

The Supreme Court did little to enforce the amendment for most of its first century. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s forced the issue. The brutality police inflicted on marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in March 1965 made federal action politically inescapable. Congress responded with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation in American history. The act, passed under the Section 2 enforcement power, created the federal machinery to make the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee operational. Black voter registration in covered states more than doubled within five years. The amendment's text has not changed in more than 150 years. Its enforcement remains an active area of federal law.