The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on this day in 1870, guaranteeing that the right to vote couldn't be denied based on "race, color, or previous condition or servitude," effectively guaranteeing the right to vote for most African American men, including the formerly enslaved. It was an expansion on the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to those born and naturalized in the U.S., including all formerly enslaved people.
The amendment came in the context of incomplete suffrage for African American voters throughout both the North and the South of the U.S. after the Civil War. Reconstruction Acts had called for Black suffrage in the South, but few such laws existed in the North. As of 1868, more than half of Northern states and most border states refused Black people the right to vote.
The amendment is brief:
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 Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
The amendment worked in encouraging African Americans to vote, with several African American men elected to office in formerly Confederate states in the 1880s. Most of that progress was reversed in the 1890s, though, through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other obstacles to their ability to vote.
To learn more about the amendment, check out this article from PBS.
