15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Voting Rights (1870) (2024)

FAQs

What did the 15th Amendment do in 1870? ›

Passed by Congress February 26, 1869, and ratified February 3, 1870, the 15th Amendment granted African American men the right to vote.

Amendment Fifteen to the Constitution – the last of the Reconstruction Amendments – was ratified on February 3, 1870. It grants the right to vote for all male citizens regardless of their ethnicity or prior slave status.

The amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The 15th Amendment guaranteed African American men the right to vote.

The Fourteenth Amendment also added the first mention of gender into the Constitution. It declared that all male citizens over twenty-one years old should be able to vote. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment affirmed that the right to vote “shall not be denied…on account of race.”

Fifteenth Amendment, amendment (1870) to the Constitution of the United States that guaranteed that the right to vote could not be denied based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The amendment complemented and followed in the wake of the passage of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments, which ...

The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) extended voting rights to men of all races. However, this amendment was not enough because African Americans were still denied the right to vote by state constitutions and laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, the “grandfather clause,” and outright intimidation.

Republicans' answer to the problem of the Black vote was to add a Constitutional amendment that guaranteed Black suffrage in all states, and no matter which party controlled the government.

The Fifteenth Amendment would guarantee protection against racial discrimination in voting. Many women's rights activists objected to the proposed amendment because the protections would only apply to men. Still, enough states approved the Fifteenth Amendment that it was adopted in 1870.

Radical Republican senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts introduced the Civil Rights Act in 1870 as an amendment to a general amnesty bill for former Confederates. The bill guaranteed all citizens, regardless of color, access to accommodations, theatres, public schools, churches, and cemeteries.

As a member of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, William Stewart of Nevada guided the Fifteenth Amendment through the Senate.

What who did the 15th Amendment leave out in terms of voting rights? ›

In other words, the insertion of the word "male" into the Constitution gave the appearance that voting was a right reserved for males only. That same year, a proposed 15th Amendment called for the end of voter discrimination on the basis of race, but no such language was added to end discrimination based on gender.

This “act to enforce the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution” was signed into law 95 years after the amendment was ratified. In those years, African Americans in the South faced tremendous obstacles to voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and other bureaucratic restrictions to deny them the right to vote.

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

Passed by the Senate on June 8, 1866, and ratified two years later, on July 9, 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to all persons "born or naturalized in the United States," including formerly enslaved people, and provided all citizens with “equal protection under the laws,” extending the provisions of ...

On March 30, 1870, the 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution was formally adopted. It had been ratified on February 3, 1870 as the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendments. On March 30, Secretary of State Hamilton Fish proclaimed the 15th Amendment to be officially part of the U.S. Constitution.

Once the 15th Amendment was ratified, AERA could then push for a separate amendment for women's suffrage. On the other hand, prominent voices such as Anthony and Stanton argued that any constitutional amendment that did not grant women's suffrage was unacceptable.

The constitutional amendment adopted in 1870 to extend suffrage to African Americans. The FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT guaranteed African Americans the right to vote, at least in principle. Small taxes levied on the right to vote. This method was used by most Southern states to exclude African Americans from voting.

Finally, on March 30, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution. To many, it felt like the last step of reconstruction. But just as some had predicted, Southerners found ways to prevent Black people from voting.