Fifteenth Amendment

THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT, ratified in 1870, prohibits the denial of the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The congressional framers intended for this amendment to have a transformative effect by guaranteeing African Americans freedom against discrimination in the exercise of their political rights, and full participation in the political system. Self-interested politics also played a prominent role in the passage of the amendment, as Republicans sought to ensure a foothold in the post-Civil War south by enfranchising African-American voters who would be predisposed to voting Republican.

For the first century after ratification, the Fifteenthth Amendment never lived up to its promise or expectations. Although African-American voting in the south remained robust for the first 20 years after ratification, this was more the product of the continued federal military presence in the south during Reconstruction and African-American resistance to violence, voter intimidation, and fraud after the military presence disappeared. At the same time that African-American voters were resisting exclusion, the Supreme Court was rendering the Fifteenthth Amendment a dead letter by limiting congressional power to enforce the amendment in cases decided in the late 19th century.

Supreme Court reluctance to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment emboldened southern states, and they soon turned to a legislative strategy that had the explicit purpose of disfranchising African-American voters. During the late 1890s and early 1900s, several southern states established discriminatory electoral qualifications. For example, legislators enacted literacy tests, some with grandfather clauses that exempted whites; broadened criminal disfranchisement laws to cover a wider array of crimes; and lengthened residency requirements. A constitutional challenge to grandfather clauses and literacy tests finally reached the Supreme Court in 1915. The court held that grandfather clauses violated the Fifteenth Amendment because they were racially discriminatory, but did not invalidate literacy tests, even though these laws had the effect of disfranchising an overwhelming number of African Americans. Implicit in the court's determination was the conclusion that these laws discriminated on account of literacy, not race.

In 1960, in Gomillion v. Lightfoot, the Supreme Court unanimously held that the redistricting of the city of Tuskegee, Alabama, which had the effect of excluding nearly every African American, and no whites from the electoral unit, violated the Fifteenthth Amendment because it had the sole purpose of depriving blacks of political influence. Gomillion would be the last Fifteenth Amendment case to address the diminution of African-American voting power, as these claims were subsequently addressed under the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause. However, Congress enacted the Voting Rights Act in 1965 through the Fifteenth Amendment, enforcement powers, and this act has had a dramatic and positive effect on the voting rights of African Americans and other minority groups.