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Fifteenth Amendment
3 articles on Fifteenth Amendment
Fifteenth Amendment
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2133 Includes: Struggle for Ratification | Limited Success of the Amendment | BibliographyRatified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was the last of the three Civil War amendments. By prohibiting discrimination in voting “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the amendment was designed to guarantee that blacks could vote on the same basis as whites. Like the Thirteenth Amendment (ending slavery) and the Fourteenth Amendment (making former slaves citizens of the nation), the Fifteenth Amendment contained an enforcement clause: “The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.” Congress proposed the amendment on 26 February 1869, and it was ratified almost a year later, on 30 March 1870. Support for the amendment was complicated and extremely political. Republicans in general saw the amendment as the final piece of the ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 632Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified on March 30, 1870, that guaranteed African American men the right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment states that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by a State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The text also gives Congress the power to enforce the amendment. Although African Americans had been freed from slavery and made citizens after the Civil War by the THIRTEENTH and FOURTEENTH AMENDMENTS, Southern states used a variety of tactics, including violence, to keep blacks from voting, and even some Northern states had not given blacks the franchise. Radical Republicans in Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment to rectify this problem. Most ...
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Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 361(1870). This amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares that the right to vote shall not be denied or restricted by the federal or state governments on account of race. The amendment reflected both the egalitarian ideals of Reconstruction and the self-interest of the Republican party.Two developments led to the framing of the amendment: the northern state elections of 1867, in which voters rejected black suffrage, and the presidential election of 1868, which signaled future electoral trouble for the Republicans. Having enfranchised southern freedmen in 1867, Republican leaders proposed the enfranchisement of African Americans—most of whom could be counted on to vote Republican—in those northern and border states that still prohibited black voting.The Republican-controlled Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment on ...
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