Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

• 1. Reconstruction Era Origins

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  In the final years of the American Civil War, Congress repeatedly debated the rights of millions of black freedmen. By 1869, amendments had been passed to abolish slavery and provide citizenship and equal protection under the laws. The election of Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency in 1868 convinced a majority of Republicans that protecting the franchise of black male voters was important for the party's future. On the 26th of February 1869, after rejecting more sweeping versions of a suffrage amendment, Republicans proposed a compromise amendment which would ban franchise restrictions on the basis of race, color, or previous servitude. This proposal emerged from a political calculation regarding congressional representation. Following the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by Congress, Republicans grew concerned over the increase it would create in the congressional representation of the Democratic-dominated Southern states. Because the full population of freed slaves would be now counted rather than the three-fifths mandated by the previous Three-Fifths Compromise, the Southern states would dramatically increase their power in the population-based House of Representatives. Republicans hoped to offset this advantage by attracting and protecting votes of the newly enfranchised black population.

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• 2. Congressional Passage And Ratification

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  The vote in the House was 144 to 44, with 35 not voting. The House vote was almost entirely along party lines, with no Democrats supporting the bill and only 3 Republicans voting against it. The final vote in the Senate was 39 to 13, with 14 not voting. The Senate passed the amendment, with 39 Republicans voting Yea and eight Democrats and five Republicans voting Nay. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certified the amendment on the 30th of March 1870. Nevada was the first state to ratify the amendment, on the 1st of March 1869. New York, which had ratified on the 14th of April 1869, tried to revoke its ratification on the 5th of January 1870. However, in February 1870, Georgia, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas ratified the amendment, bringing the total ratifying states to twenty-nine. This number was one more than the required twenty-eight ratifications from the thirty-seven states, and forestalling any court challenge to New York's resolution to withdraw its consent. Newly elected President Ulysses S. Grant strongly endorsed the amendment, calling 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.

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• 3. The Great Suffrage Split

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  Matters came to a head with the proposal of the Fifteenth Amendment, which barred race discrimination but not sex discrimination in voter laws. One of Congress's most explicit discussions regarding the link between suffrage and officeholding occurred during discussions about the Fifteenth Amendment. Initially, both houses passed a version of the amendment that included language referring to officeholding but ultimately the language was omitted. During this time, women continued to advocate for their own rights, holding conventions and passing resolutions demanding the right to vote and hold office. Some preliminary versions of the amendment even included women. However, the final version omitted references to sex, further splintering the women's suffrage movement. After an acrimonious debate, the American Equal Rights Association, the nation's leading suffragist group, split into two rival organizations: the National Woman Suffrage Association of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who opposed the amendment, and the American Woman Suffrage Association of Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell, who supported it. The two groups remained divided until the 1890s.

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• 4. Judicial Narrowing And Jim Crow

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  In United States v. Reese (1876), the first U.S. Supreme Court decision interpreting the Fifteenth Amendment, the Court interpreted the amendment narrowly, upholding ostensibly race-neutral limitations on suffrage, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and a grandfather clause that exempted citizens from other voting requirements if their grandfathers had been registered voters. A number of blacks were killed at the Colfax massacre of 1873 while attempting to defend their right to vote. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876, decided the same day as Reese), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government did not have the authority to prosecute the perpetrators of the Colfax massacre because they were not state actors. From 1890 to 1910, poll taxes and literacy tests were instituted across the South, effectively disenfranchising the great majority of black men. White male-only primary elections also served to reduce the influence of black men in the political system. Along with increasing legal obstacles, blacks were excluded from the political system by threats of violent reprisals by whites in the form of lynch mobs and terrorist attacks by the Ku Klux Klan.

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• 5. Civil Rights Movement Restoration

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  In Guinn v. United States (1915), a unanimous Court struck down an Oklahoma grandfather clause that effectively exempted white voters from a literacy test, finding it to be discriminatory. The Court addressed the white primary system in a series of decisions later known as the Texas primary cases. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), overruled Grovey, ruling that denying non-white voters a ballot in primary elections was a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment. After judicial enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment ended grandfather clauses, white primaries, and other discriminatory tactics, Southern black voter registration gradually increased, rising from five percent in 1940 to twenty-eight percent in 1960. Congress used its authority pursuant to Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, achieving further racial equality in voting. Sections 4 and 5 of the Voting Rights Act required states and local governments with histories of racial discrimination in voting to submit all changes to their voting laws or practices to the federal government for approval before they could take effect, a process called preclearance. By 1976, sixty-three percent of Southern blacks were registered to vote, a figure only five percent less than that for Southern whites.

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• 6. Modern Legal Challenges

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  In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court ruled that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which established the coverage formula that determined which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance, was no longer constitutional and exceeded Congress's enforcement authority under Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Court declared that the Fifteenth Amendment commands that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race or color, and it gives Congress the power to enforce that command. In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, 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. While the preclearance provision itself was not struck down, it will continue to be inoperable unless Congress passes a new coverage formula. The Court also found poll taxes in state elections unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections (1966). The ruling held that the elections violated the Fifteenth Amendment by using ancestry as a racial definition and for a racial purpose in Rice v. Cayetano (2000).

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