Amendment, Fifteenth

Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1870 during the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War (1861–65). It decrees that federal and state governments cannot bar a citizen from voting on the basis of former slavery or race. The Fifteenth Amendment was initially limited in its effect, as many states deployed tactics making it impossible for African Americans to vote. It also only applied to men; no women of any race were permitted to vote until 1920.

The Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the Reconstruction amendments ratified after the Civil War to ban slavery and give equal rights to African Americans; the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, and the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868, granted citizenship to African Americans in the USA, but left their voting rights unclear (see Amendment, Thirteenth and Amendment, Fourteenth).

Although the Fifteenth Amendment decrees that a person cannot be barred from voting on the basis of ‘race, color, or previous condition of servitude’, it leaves states free to set qualifications for voters. Taking advantage of this, many states developed strategies and measures designed to keep African Americans from the polls, a practice which lasted well into the 20th century. Several states, particularly in the South, imposed restrictive residence laws, registration requirements, and poll taxes that excluded African Americans from the voting process.

North Carolina began this practice in 1889 by demanding very precise information about a potential voter's age and birthplace, information that many former slaves did not have. White Mississippians devised a poll tax that required people to have made payments for two years before voting, making it impossible for most African Americans to participate in the electoral process. Other tactics included the ‘grandfather clause’, which stated that a person was only eligible to vote if his grandfather had been eligible to vote; in the 1890s this limited eligibility almost exclusively to white Americans. Intimidation, violence, and terrorism were also used to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote.

It was not until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act 1957 that a commission to investigate voting discrimination was established, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed to increase African-American voter registration by empowering the Justice Department to closely monitor voting qualifications.

While the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the right to vote to all free men, women were still prohibited from going to the ballot. Advocates of women's suffrage suggested that sex should be added to the list of discredited grounds for discrimination, and argued for a further amendment. However, it was not until 1920 that the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, declaring that no citizen can be denied the right to vote on the basis of sex (see Amendment, Nineteenth).