What was the Fifteenth Amendment?

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited the denial of voting rights on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and was ratified on February 3, 1870, the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments to address the legal status of African Americans. The amendment has two short sections. Section 1 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. The amendment empowers Congress through Section 2 to pass enforcement legislation, the authority later used to enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Congress proposed the amendment on February 26, 1869 after intense debate over its scope. Some Republicans wanted broader language banning discrimination based on nativity, education, or property as well as race, but those provisions were dropped to ensure passage. The narrowness of the actual language eventually permitted southern states to evade its purpose through nominally race-neutral devices like literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses.

The amendment passed the Senate by 39 to 13 on February 26, 1869 and the House by 144 to 44 the same day. Ratification followed quickly. Iowa was the first state to ratify on February 3, 1869, and twenty-eight states had ratified by February 3, 1870 when Iowa (some sources say Georgia) became the twenty-eighth state, satisfying the three-quarters requirement. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certified the amendment on March 30, 1870.

The Fifteenth Amendment did not give voting rights to women of any race; women's suffrage required the Nineteenth Amendment ratified August 18, 1920. It also did not grant voting rights to Native Americans, who remained generally non-citizens until the Indian Citizenship Act of June 2, 1924, although they faced state-level voting barriers thereafter.

Within a few years of ratification, southern states began constructing systems to disenfranchise Black voters within the technical wording of the amendment. Mississippi's 1890 constitution introduced poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements, and other devices that excluded most Black voters and many poor white voters. Other southern states followed. The Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi (1898) upheld these devices because they did not technically discriminate by race. Black voter registration in former Confederate states fell from majorities in some states during Reconstruction to nearly zero by 1910.

The Fifteenth Amendment was effectively a dead letter in the South until the Voting Rights Act of August 6, 1965 finally provided enforcement machinery and the Twenty-Fourth Amendment ratified January 23, 1964 banned poll taxes in federal elections. Smith v. Allwright (1944) ended the white primary, and Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966) banned poll taxes in state elections.