This article traces the legislative origins, ratification, early enforcement, dismantlement, and eventual revival of the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. For interpretive debates about the amendment's scope and legacy, see Fifteenth Amendment - Debate. For the constitutional and legal consensus, see Fifteenth Amendment - Constitutional Law Consensus.
The Fifteenth Amendment emerged from the political circumstances following the Civil War and the enactment of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments (1865, 1868). By 1868, ten reconstructed Southern states had been readmitted to the Union under congressional Reconstruction plans that required new state constitutions enfranchising black male voters. Northern and border states, however, varied widely in their suffrage laws. Several free states - including Ohio, Michigan, and Connecticut - had rejected black suffrage referendums during the 1860s. Congress and Republican Party leadership recognized that black voting rights in the South rested on temporary congressional authority and could be reversed by future legislation or Democratic electoral victories.
The 1868 presidential election, in which Ulysses S. Grant won by a margin that Republican analysts attributed in part to black votes in Southern states, increased Republican interest in a constitutional guarantee of black male suffrage. Party leaders also calculated that enfranchising black men in Northern states would expand the Republican electoral base.
The 40th Congress took up the suffrage question in its final session beginning in December 1868. Multiple draft proposals circulated, reflecting disagreement over how broadly the amendment should be written.
One faction, associated with Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, proposed a sweeping prohibition on any suffrage distinction based on race, nativity, property, education, or creed. This formulation would have prevented literacy tests, property requirements, and similar indirect restrictions regardless of race.
A narrower faction, which ultimately prevailed, favored limiting the amendment's text to a prohibition on denying or abridging the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Supporters of this formulation argued that states retained the general authority to set voter qualifications, provided those qualifications did not explicitly invoke race. The narrower text also preserved existing exclusions of women and Chinese immigrants - exclusions that some Republican members wished to maintain.
The House passed its version on January 30, 1869. The Senate debated and amended the measure through February, with conference proceedings resolving differences between chambers. The final text - brief and prohibitory rather than affirmative - was approved by the Senate on February 26, 1869, and by the House the same day. The 40th Congress submitted it to the states on February 27, 1869, the final day of the session.
Ratification required approval by three-fourths of the states - at that time, twenty-eight of thirty-seven. Congress, exercising its Reconstruction authority, required several unreconstructed Southern states to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as conditions of readmission.
Several Northern states initially rejected ratification. Ohio and California voted against it; New York ratified and then attempted to rescind its ratification in 1870. New Jersey and Tennessee also declined to ratify during the original period.
The required twenty-eighth ratification came from Iowa on February 3, 1870. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certified the amendment's adoption on March 30, 1870. Georgia's ratification, submitted late, was acknowledged as the twenty-ninth. In total, thirty states ratified during the original period.
Ratification was marked by celebrations in black communities across the country. In Baltimore, an estimated ten thousand people participated in a procession on May 19, 1870. Similar events were held in Philadelphia, New York, and cities throughout the South.
Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870 (also known as the First Ku Klux Klan Act) to give the Fifteenth Amendment federal teeth. The act made it a federal crime to interfere with voting rights on account of race and authorized federal oversight of elections. The Enforcement Act of 1871 and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 followed, extending federal authority over political and civil rights.
During the early 1870s, black men voted and held office across the South in substantial numbers. Between 1870 and 1901, twenty-two black men served in the U.S. House of Representatives, and two - Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both of Mississippi - served in the Senate.
The Compromise of 1877, which resolved the disputed 1876 presidential election by awarding the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, included the withdrawal of the remaining federal troops from the South. This effectively ended federally enforced Reconstruction in the former Confederate states.
Southern Democratic governments - the so-called “Redeemer” governments - moved systematically to suppress black political participation through methods designed to avoid explicit racial language. These mechanisms included:
The Supreme Court narrowed federal enforcement authority in several key decisions. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment constrained only state action, not private violence. In United States v. Reese (1876), the Court struck down portions of the Enforcement Act. In Williams v. Mississippi (1898), the Court upheld Mississippi's literacy tests and poll taxes as facially race-neutral.
Mississippi's constitutional convention of 1890 served as a model, adopting poll taxes, literacy tests, and residency requirements that reduced black voter registration dramatically. South Carolina (1895), Louisiana (1898), North Carolina (1900), and other states followed with similar constitutional revisions.
By 1900, black voter registration in the South had collapsed. In Louisiana, for example, there had been approximately 130,000 black registered voters in 1896; by 1904 fewer than 1,500 remained on the rolls.
The early twentieth century saw the near-total exclusion of black voters from Southern political life, with the Supreme Court providing minimal resistance. In Giles v. Harris (1903), the Court declined to order Alabama to register black voters despite acknowledging the discriminatory purpose of the state's registration system, on the grounds that the Court lacked the means to enforce such an order.
The white primary system extended across the South. Texas's white primary was challenged repeatedly in federal courts. In Nixon v. Herndon (1927) and Nixon v. Condon (1932), the Supreme Court struck down statutes explicitly excluding black voters from primaries, but Texas then transferred control of primaries to the Democratic Party itself, which the Court initially upheld in Grovey v. Townsend (1935).
The NAACP, founded in 1909, pursued a litigation strategy aimed at dismantling the legal architecture of disfranchisement. Early cases focused on grandfather clauses; in Guinn v. United States (1915), the Supreme Court struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause as a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment - one of the few successful enforcement actions of the period.
The Supreme Court reversed Grovey v. Townsend in Smith v. Allwright (1944), holding that the white primary violated the Fifteenth Amendment because the Democratic Party exercised a state function in conducting primary elections. This decision reopened primary participation to black voters in principle, though registration barriers and violence persisted.
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) addressed racially restrictive housing covenants. In Terry v. Adams (1953), the Court extended Smith v. Allwright to a private pre-primary association in Texas that excluded black voters.
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such legislation since Reconstruction, establishing the Civil Rights Commission and authorizing the Justice Department to seek injunctions against voting rights violations. The act's enforcement mechanisms proved limited in practice. A follow-up Civil Rights Act in 1960 added additional provisions but was similarly constrained.
Throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights organizations including the NAACP, SNCC, CORE, and SCLC mounted voter registration drives across the South. Registrars in many jurisdictions continued to reject black applicants through selective application of literacy tests and other procedural barriers. Violence against registration workers and applicants was documented in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and other states.
The march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, organized to demand federal voting rights protection, was attacked by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 - an event televised nationally. President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed Congress on March 15, calling for voting rights legislation.
Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law on August 6. The act suspended literacy tests and similar devices in jurisdictions that used a test or device as of November 1964 and had low voter registration or turnout meeting the act's statistical criteria (Section 4), required those jurisdictions to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing voting laws (Section 5), authorized federal examiners to register voters directly, and empowered the Justice Department and private plaintiffs to bring suit. The act operated as aggressive federal enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court upheld the act's preclearance regime in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966). Literacy tests were permanently banned nationwide by the Voting Rights Act Amendments of 1970.
Black voter registration in the South increased substantially within years of the act's passage. The number of black elected officials grew from a few hundred nationally in 1965 to several thousand by the mid-1970s.
Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006. The 2006 reauthorization extended the preclearance regime for twenty-five years.
In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, struck down Section 4's coverage formula as outdated and therefore unconstitutional under principles of equal state sovereignty. Without a valid coverage formula, Section 5 preclearance became inoperative, as jurisdictions could not be identified as subject to it.
Following Shelby County, several states enacted or implemented voting laws - including strict photo ID requirements, reductions in early voting, and changes to registration procedures - that had previously been subject to preclearance review. Litigation over these measures continued in federal and state courts through the following decade.
In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee (2021), the Supreme Court addressed Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices that result in the denial or abridgement of the right to vote on account of race. The Court upheld two Arizona voting restrictions and articulated a framework limiting the reach of Section 2 results-based challenges.
Congress debated but did not enact legislation to restore or update the preclearance regime following Shelby County. As of 2024, the coverage formula struck down in 2013 has not been replaced.
Some historians argue that the Fifteenth Amendment's narrow text was deliberately designed to permit indirect disfranchisement mechanisms, rather than representing a principled commitment to universal suffrage - a claim disputed by historians who attribute the narrow text to practical political constraints and contemporaneous limitations on federal authority; see Fifteenth Amendment - Debate.
Whether the Compromise of 1877 constituted a formal agreement trading Southern acceptance of Hayes's presidency for troop withdrawal, or whether it reflects a more diffuse political realignment, remains contested among historians of Reconstruction; see Reconstruction - Debate.
The question of whether Shelby County v. Holder correctly applied constitutional principles or effectively gutted the Fifteenth Amendment's enforcement mechanisms is an active legal and historical controversy; see Voting Rights Act - Debate and Fifteenth Amendment - Debate.