1870
THE 15TH AMENDMENT
The 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, was aimed at Black enfranchisement. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote,” the amendment reads, “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
One day after it was ratified, Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first Black person to vote under the authority of the 15th Amendment.
In theory, the measure provided Black men with most basic privilege of citizenship in a republic: the right to participate in the election of political leaders. It was by no means an act of pure idealism; rather, it was a form of partisan calculation, since it was assumed that Black voters would constitute an essential base for keeping the Republican Party in power in the South.
Yet its civic vision could have scarcely been more radical. In the 1860s, most Blacks lived in a world of absolute political disability. To most whites, the notion that a largely illiterate servant class, presumably vulnerable to bribery and coercion, would be given a say in determining the composition of their state and national political leadership seemed absurd, indeed dangerous. But by 1870, Black men who had been enslaved people only a few years earlier were placing tickets in ballot boxes.
With the adoption of the 15th Amendment, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies in the Southern states to elect Republicans to power. Soon all of the former states of the Confederacy had been readmitted to the Union, and most were controlled by the Republican Party, thanks to the support of Black voters.
Despite the amendment’s passage, by the late 1870s dozens of discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South. In the ensuing decades, a range of discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests—along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation, threats and outright violence—were used to prevent Black men from exercising their right to vote. With the end of Reconstruction, the Southern Republican Party vanished, and Southern state governments effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (which guaranteed citizenship and all its privileges to Black Americans) and the 15th amendment, stripping Black citizens in the South of the right to vote.
Sources
Mark S. Weiner, Black Trials: Citizenship from the Beginnings of Slavery to the end of Caste, 1st ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 188-192.