Fifteenth Amendment
Black suffrage guarantee
The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, prohibits denying citizens the right to vote based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
It was the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments following the Civil War.
Despite its guarantees, Southern states circumvented it for nearly a century through poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 provided enforcement mechanisms.
- right to voteLegal power to elect
- votingFormally registering a choice
- suffrageRight to cast ballots
- raceCompetition of speed
- BlackAfrican descent identifier
citizenship · equal protection · ratification · Reconstruction · ballot · ballot box · voter registration · Voting Rights Act · franchise · civil rights · freedmen · Constitution · constitutional right · equality · discrimination · poll tax · Jim Crow · 1870
- civil rightsequal protection, equal rights, Civil Rights Act, right to life, Voting Rights Act
- constitutional lawConstitution, Bill of Rights, constitutional law, constitutional rights, constitutional review
- Reconstructionfreedmen, Freedmen's Bureau, carpetbaggers, scalawags, Radical Republicans
- Suffrageright to vote, suffragette, suffrage movement, suffragettes, votes for women
- Historic LawsHomestead Act, Fugitive Slave Act, Missouri Compromise, Kansas-Nebraska Act, Chinese Exclusion Act
- electionsballot, ballots, voter registration, candidates, polls
Fifteenth Amendmentvoter suppression
Tactics discouraging ballot access
disenfranchisement · poll taxes · literacy tests · voter ID laws · voter purges
Fifteenth AmendmentJim Crow laws
Post-Reconstruction racial separation statutes
white supremacy · Dred Scott decision · Plessy v. Ferguson · segregation
Fifteenth Amendmentnullification
Formal cancellation of validity
fifteen, fifth, amend, amends, amended, amending, amendment, amendments, amendable