Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

• 1. Introduction

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  The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on the 3rd of February, 1870, with a single sentence doing the work: the right to vote could not be denied on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It was the third and final of the Reconstruction Amendments, born in the bloodstained aftermath of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant called it "a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day." African Americans called it the nation's "second birth" and a "greater revolution than that of 1776." Yet within two decades of its ratification, the machinery of disenfranchisement had made those words nearly hollow across much of the country. How does a constitutional guarantee become unenforceable? Why did a Republican Congress, which had passed the amendment unanimously within party lines, later watch Southern states systematically undo its promise? And what does it mean when a law that was never repealed must still be fought for, generation after generation?

• 2. The Political Calculation

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  Republicans who championed black suffrage in 1869 were not always acting from pure principle. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, had created a troubling arithmetic problem for the party. Because the full population of freed slaves would now be counted for congressional representation, rather than the three-fifths ratio under the old compromise, the Democratic-dominated Southern states stood to gain dramatically more seats in the House. Republicans calculated that protecting the black vote was essential to offsetting that advantage.

  The election of Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency in 1868 crystallized that thinking. A majority of Republicans concluded that securing black male suffrage was not only a moral obligation but a political necessity for the party's survival. They moved quickly during the lame-duck session of the 40th Congress, before a projected increase in Democratic membership could block them.

  The final text that emerged was narrower than many had proposed. Representative John Bingham, the primary author of the Fourteenth Amendment, pushed for a wide-ranging ban on suffrage limitations. A broader proposal banning voter restrictions based on race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious beliefs was rejected. So was a specific ban on literacy tests. Northern representatives wanted to preserve rules denying votes to foreign-born citizens. Western representatives were unwilling to extend suffrage to ethnic Chinese residents. Both Northern and Southern Republicans also wanted to continue barring former Confederate supporters from voting, and feared a sweeping amendment would inadvertently enfranchise that group.

  The compromise text said nothing about poll taxes, nothing about literacy tests, and made no guarantee that black men could hold office. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, a Radical Republican, abstained from the Senate vote precisely because the amendment failed to prohibit those devices. The House passed it 144 to 44 on the 25th of February, 1869. The Senate passed it the following day, 39 to 13, with every supporting vote coming from Republicans and not a single Democratic vote in favor in either chamber.

• 3. A Fractured Coalition

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  Nevada became the first state to ratify the amendment on the 1st of March, 1869, and a wave of Northern and Midwestern states followed within weeks. But the ratification fight exposed a fracture that would outlast Reconstruction itself.

  The women's suffrage movement had been an ally of the abolitionist cause before and during the Civil War. State constitutions had often tied race and sex together by limiting suffrage to "white male citizens," which meant that a fight for racial equality was also, implicitly, a fight over women's place in the franchise. The Fourteenth Amendment had already driven a wedge by explicitly protecting only male citizens in its second section. The Fifteenth Amendment widened that gap by prohibiting race discrimination in voting while saying nothing about sex discrimination.

  The American Equal Rights Association, the leading suffragist organization at the time, split apart over whether to support the amendment. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association and opposed ratification. Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, who argued the amendment was a step forward worth supporting, formed the rival American Woman Suffrage Association. The two groups remained divided until the 1890s.

  Meanwhile, Grant worked behind the scenes to secure the needed ratifications. He privately asked Nebraska's governor to call a special legislative session to speed the state's approval. Congress passed Reconstruction bills in April and December of 1869 requiring Virginia, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia to ratify as a condition of regaining congressional representation. New York ratified on the 14th of April, 1869, then tried to revoke that ratification on the 5th of January, 1870. Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas ratified in February 1870, bringing the total to twenty-nine ratifying states, one more than the twenty-eight required from thirty-seven states. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certified the amendment on the 30th of March, 1870.

• 4. First Votes and Early Violence

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  Thomas Mundy Peterson cast a ballot in Perth Amboy, New Jersey on the 31st of March, 1870, in a referendum on a revised city charter, becoming the first black person known to vote under the amendment's protection. The celebrations in black communities and abolitionist societies were widespread. Many abolitionist groups disbanded, believing their work was complete.

  Future president James A. Garfield declared that the amendment "confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands." Congressman John R. Lynch wrote that ratification of both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments made Reconstruction a success. During Reconstruction, 16 black men served in Congress and 2,000 black men held elected local, state, and federal positions.

  The violence came quickly and systematically. The Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups used paramilitary tactics to prevent black men from reaching the polls. A number of black men were killed at the Colfax massacre of 1873 while attempting to defend their right to vote. Congress responded with the Enforcement Acts of 1870-1871, authorizing federal prosecution of the Klan and others who violated the amendment. But in United States v. Cruikshank, decided in 1876, the Supreme Court ruled that because the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre were not state actors, the federal government lacked authority to prosecute them.

  In United States v. Reese, also decided in 1876, the Court in its first interpretation of the Fifteenth Amendment read it narrowly, finding that it did not itself confer the right of suffrage. It only prohibited states from discriminating on the basis of race. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses exempting citizens from voting requirements if their grandfathers had been registered voters were treated as ostensibly race-neutral and allowed to stand.

• 5. Jim Crow and the Collapse of Enforcement

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  Republican Rutherford B. Hayes entered the White House in 1877 after a contested election in which he received support from three Southern states in exchange for a promise to let white Democratic governments rule without federal interference. He refused to enforce federal civil rights protections. Federal troops were withdrawn from the South and prosecutions under the Enforcement Acts dropped significantly.

  From 1890 to 1910, poll taxes and literacy tests spread across Southern states. White-male-only Democratic primaries further excluded black voters from meaningful political participation, because in the one-party South the primary was effectively the election. Lynch mobs and Klan violence reinforced every legal barrier with the threat of death. Some Democrats openly called for repealing the amendment, among them William Bourke Cockran of New York. Congress in 1894 weakened the Enforcement Acts further by removing a provision against conspiracy. A Federal Elections Bill, known as the Lodge Bill of 1890, which might have provided federal oversight, was successfully filibustered in the Senate.

  In Ex Parte Yarbrough in 1884, the Court had allowed individuals who were not state actors to be prosecuted under Article I's grant to Congress of authority over federal elections, but this holding did little to reverse the broader retreat. By 1940, only five percent of Southern black men were registered to vote.

• 6. The Texas Primary Cases

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  Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon was denied a ballot in a Democratic Party primary election in Texas solely because of his race. He sued for damages under federal civil rights laws. In Nixon v. Herndon in 1927, the Court ruled in his favor, finding a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection guarantee, while leaving his Fifteenth Amendment argument unaddressed.

  Texas responded by letting the party's state executive committee set its own voting qualifications. Nixon sued again. In Nixon v. Condon in 1932, the Court again found in his favor, again on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. The Democratic Party's state convention then simply declared that only whites could vote in its primaries. In Grovey v. Townsend in 1935, the Court unanimously upheld that rule, reasoning that a private organization's discrimination was different from state action.

  The logic cracked in United States v. Classic in 1941, when the Court ruled that primary elections were an essential part of the electoral process. Building on that reasoning, Smith v. Allwright in 1944 overruled Grovey entirely, holding that barring non-white voters from primary elections violated the Fifteenth Amendment. The final case in the series, Terry v. Adams in 1953, extended liability to a private group that organized whites-only pre-primary elections with the assistance of Democratic Party officials.

  In a separate line of cases, the Court struck down an Oklahoma grandfather clause in Guinn v. United States in 1915, and its companion case Myers v. Anderson in 1915 found that officials who enforced such clauses were personally liable for civil damages. By 1960, black voter registration in the South had risen to twenty-eight percent, up from five percent in 1940, reflecting the cumulative effect of these rulings.

• 7. The Voting Rights Act and Its Limits

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  Gomillion v. Lightfoot, decided in 1960, gave the Fifteenth Amendment new reach when the Court struck down a gerrymander by Tuskegee, Alabama officials who had redrawn city limits to exclude the mostly black area surrounding the Tuskegee Institute. That decision later provided the basis for Rice v. Cayetano in 2000, where the Court struck down ancestry-based voting in elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs on the grounds that using ancestry as a racial definition violated the amendment.

  Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 under its Section 2 enforcement authority. Sections 4 and 5 required states and localities with histories of racial discrimination in voting to submit all changes to voting laws or practices to the federal government before they could take effect, a process called preclearance. By 1976, sixty-three percent of Southern black voters were registered, a figure only five percent below the rate for Southern whites.

  The Supreme Court upheld preclearance in South Carolina v. Katzenbach in 1966. But in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, the Court ruled that the coverage formula determining which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance was no longer constitutional, effectively disabling the preclearance mechanism. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, writing that "throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet." The preclearance provision itself was not struck down, but it remains inoperable unless Congress enacts a new coverage formula.

  Columbia University historian Eric Foner, writing in the amendment's 150th anniversary year, offered a summation that the source text itself bears out: "The history of the 15th Amendment also shows rights can never be taken for granted. Things can be achieved and things can be taken away."