The Fifteenth amendment. New York: Alfred R. The Fifteenth Amendment and its results. Baltimore: Lith. Congress still needed 11 more states to ratify the amendment before it could become law. All eyes turned toward those Southern states which had yet to be readmitted to the Union. Acting quickly, Congress ruled that in order to be let into the Union, these states had to accept both the Fifteenth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted citizenship to all people born in the United States, including former slaves.
Left with no choice, the states ratified the amendments and were restored to statehood. Finally, on March 30, , 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 blacks from voting. Southern politics would turn violent as Democrats and Republicans clashed over the right of former slaves to enter civic life. White supremacist vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan gained strength as many whites refused to accept blacks as their equals.
America still faced years of struggle. As part of the overall plan that Republican Party leaders in Congress developed after the war to guarantee that freedom from slavery could become genuine freedom, not merely an absence of slavery, Congress submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to the states on February 26, It granted African American men the right to vote by prohibiting the states from denying the vote to any citizen because of race, skin color, or having once been held in slavery.
Because Virginia had been a Confederate state and had not yet been fully reinstated to the Union, no Virginians served in Congress when it submitted the amendment to the states. Following the end of the Civil War, the Senate and House of Representatives placed the states of the former Confederacy except Tennessee but including Virginia, part of which had remained one of the United States during the war under military rule and refused to seat any men elected to either house of Congress from those states.
Constitutional Convention of — Poll Book Listing Colored" Voters in """ A Reconstruction—era poll book from Virginia lists the names of the African Americans from the Third Congressional District, in Southampton County, who cast their votes in the October 22, , election "for and against a [constitutional] Convention and for a delegate to the same.
Army, which oversaw the election, demanded separate poll lists and voting results for black and white citizens. Nearly 98 percent of eligible African American males voted in the county, while only 56 percent of eligible white voters participated. County voters overwhelmingly approved the convention—1, 1, African Americans and 20 whites to all whites. An engraving from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, published on February 15, , depicts a working session of the constitutional convention that met in Richmond from December 3, , to April 17, In the statewide election of delegates, African American males successfully voted for the first time; about two dozen black delegates were elected.
Radical Republicans sympathetic to African American interests dominated the convention. On the final day of the convention the delegates approved a new constitution, which included among its reforms universal manhood suffrage, the establishment of a public school system, and more elective local offices.
On July 6, , voters ratified the constitution but rejected two clauses that would have disfranchised many Virginians who had supported the Confederacy. This chart shows the voting breakdown in Richmond for delegates to the Convention of — The slate of five Republican candidates—two African American Radicals and three white men—won the election by securing almost all of the black vote.
Morton noted that 5, white voters were registered, compared to 6, black voters, leading to "a contest … between the white race and the black race. A political cartoon in the Southern Opinion , published on December 7, , mocks the slate of Radical Republicans elected from Richmond to the Convention of —, which was then in session. Delegate Lewis Lindsey, a former slave and a professional bandleader, is depicted blowing a horn and dancing barefoot on the "Constitution of District 1.
Joseph Cox, the other African American delegate representing Richmond, stands in back. The satirical caption notes that the fifth delegate, the white judge John Underwood, "has repaired to Morrisey's grocery to get another 'horn'—stimulants having run low.
The disfranchisement of former Confederates was the most controversial part of the new constitution and it delayed the scheduled ratification referendum. Eventually, a group of men known as the Committee of Nine worked out a compromise with President Ulysses S. Grant that authorized separate voting on the section that disfranchised former Confederates. On July 6, , in the second election in which African Americans voted in Virginia, the voters approved the new constitution and rejected the disfranchisement section.
On that same day, voters elected statewide officers and members of a new assembly. On the fourth day of its next session, the General Assembly ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, making Virginia the eighteenth state to do so. Constitution protects the freedom of speech, religion and the press. It also protects the right to peaceful protest and to petition the government. The amendment was adopted in along with nine other amendments that make up the Bill of Brown v.
Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark Supreme Court case in which the justices ruled unanimously that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional.
Board of Education was one of the cornerstones of the civil rights movement, Black codes were restrictive laws designed to limit the freedom of African Americans and ensure their availability as a cheap labor force after slavery was abolished during the Civil War. Though the Union victory had given some 4 million enslaved people their freedom, the Live TV. This Day In History.
History Vault. What Is the 15th Amendment?
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