What does the Fifteenth Amendment say?

The Fifteenth Amendment says that voting cannot be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, was the third and final Reconstruction Amendment, completing the constitutional transformation that began with the abolition of slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 and continued with the equal protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Section 1 declares: 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.

Like other Reconstruction-era amendments, the Fifteenth includes an enforcement section authorizing Congress to pass legislation carrying out its provisions. The previous condition of servitude phrase specifically protects formerly enslaved people, ensuring that southern states could not bar Black voters by referencing past slavery.

The amendment was the product of fierce debate within the Republican Party. Radical Republicans wanted broader protection that would have barred discrimination based on property, education, or sex, while moderates pushed a narrower amendment focused on race. Congress passed the moderate version on February 26, 1869, and ratification was completed when Iowa ratified on February 3, 1870.

The amendment quickly transformed political life in the Reconstruction South. Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi became the first Black member of the U.S. Senate on February 25, 1870. Joseph Rainey of South Carolina took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 12, 1870. Black voter registration soared, and approximately two thousand Black officials held positions in southern state legislatures, county offices, and municipal governments during Reconstruction.

After federal troops withdrew in 1877, however, southern states systematically nullified the amendment through poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, white-only primaries, gerrymandering, and outright violence by groups including the Ku Klux Klan. The Supreme Court permitted some early evasions in cases such as Williams v. Mississippi (1898) before the modern era reversed course in Smith v. Allwright (1944) banning white primaries.

Real federal enforcement came with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965, after the Selma to Montgomery marches. The Act suspended literacy tests, authorized federal examiners, and required preclearance of voting changes in covered jurisdictions until Shelby County v. Holder (2013) struck down the coverage formula. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 had already banned poll taxes in federal elections, and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) extended that ban to state elections.

Naturalization candidates should know the Fifteenth Amendment as the constitutional ban on racial discrimination in voting.