The Fifteenth Amendment
Race and voting rights
Bars governments from denying the vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Ratified 1870 · 3 minute read
Published by Quasi-Legal Institute · Report an error
Section 1. 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. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
In plain language
Federal and state governments
Both levels of government are covered. “Denied” means taking the vote away entirely, and “abridged” means making it harder to use.
What it did and what it did not
The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870 so that Black men, many of them newly freed, could vote. In the years that followed, Black voters in the South elected hundreds of officials. When federal enforcement faded after Reconstruction, many states found other ways to keep Black citizens from voting.
The amendment applied to race, not to sex. Women were not guaranteed the vote nationally until the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
Workarounds and the courts
States used poll taxes, literacy tests, and other devices that were not written in racial terms. Some courts struck them down. In Guinn v. United States (1915), the Court invalidated Oklahoma’s grandfather clause, which exempted from a literacy test anyone whose ancestors had been eligible to vote in 1866. In Smith v. Allwright (1944), it struck down all-white primary elections, and in Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), it invalidated a redrawn city boundary that excluded nearly all Black residents of Tuskegee, Alabama.
Progress was slow until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), the Court struck down the formula that decided which states had to get federal approval before changing voting rules. Congress has not passed a new formula, and debate over the proper response continues.