What is the Fifteenth Amendment?

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibits federal and state governments from denying the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Ratified on February 3, 1870, it was the third and final Reconstruction Amendment, completing the constitutional transformation that had begun with the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 and the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Its text declares that 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, and Section 2 grants Congress power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The amendment was the product of fierce debate within the Republican Party. Radical Republicans wanted broad protection of voting rights, including for women, while moderates pushed a narrower version focused on race. Congress passed the amendment on February 26, 1869, and ratification was accomplished after a hard fight in northern, southern, and border states. Several states, including New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, California, and Tennessee, refused to ratify before 1870, and some did not formally ratify until well into the twentieth century.

The amendment quickly transformed political life. Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi became the first Black member of the U.S. Senate on February 25, 1870, and Joseph Rainey of South Carolina took his House seat on December 12, 1870. Black voter registration soared across the South 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, and outright violence by groups including the Ku Klux Klan. The Supreme Court permitted some early evasions, allowing white primaries in Newberry v. United States (1921) before reversing course in Smith v. Allwright (1944), and tolerating poll taxes until the Twenty-Fourth Amendment in 1964 banned them in federal elections and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) extended the ban to state elections.

Real federal enforcement came with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which authorized federal examiners to register voters in jurisdictions with discriminatory practices, banned literacy tests, and required preclearance of voting changes in covered jurisdictions. Shelby County v. Holder (2013) struck down the preclearance coverage formula. The Fifteenth Amendment now protects voters in every state, although debates over voter identification, registration rules, and gerrymandering continue. Naturalization candidates should remember the amendment as the constitutional foundation for racial equality at the ballot box.