15th Amendment
The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, granted African American men the right to vote. It aimed to ensure that race would not be a barrier to voting, although it was not fully enforced until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The amendment was a significant step towards addressing racial inequality and expanding democratic rights in the United States.
5 Key excerpts on "15th Amendment"
eBook - ePubThe Laws That Shaped America
Fifteen Acts of Congress and Their Lasting Impact
- Dennis W. Johnson(Author)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The third group were the hard-liners under Stanton and Anthony: if women were not included in the Fifteenth, then the amendment should be scuttled altogether. 31 The Fifteenth Amendment was approved by both houses of Congress in February 1869, and sent to the states for ratification. Black males, and not women, were to be given constitutional protection: “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.” In May 1869, after Congress had approved the amendment but before its ratification by the states, resentment boiled over at the anniversary meeting of the American Equal Rights Association. On May 13, in Steinway Hall in New York City, Anthony appealed to her fellow delegates for universal suffrage, but, if that could not happen, then women, through a new Sixteenth Amendment, should have preference over former slaves and ignorant foreign men flooding to America’s shores. “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling-book, making laws for Lucretia Mott” and other women leaders, Anthony said in scorn. 32 Then spoke Frederick Douglass, a long-time friend of woman’s suffrage. Politely Douglass said that he had come to the meeting more to listen than to speak, and he congratulated Stanton on her earlier speech calling for universal suffrage. He argued that the AERA delegates should indeed support the Fifteenth Amendment, because there was a much greater urgency for black votes than for women’s votes. “With us,” said Douglass, “the matter is a question of life and death, at least, in fifteen States of the Union...
- John A. Kirk(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Part 6 Documents Document 1 Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, 1865 The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the first step for black Americans on the road to freedom and equality. Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Document 2 Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, 1868 The Fourteenth Amendment defined what it meant to be a citizen of the US-‘bom or naturalized’ – and promised equal protection of the laws to all citizens. Section 1. All persons bom or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. 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. Document 3 Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, 1870 The Fifteenth Amendment promised voting rights to all male citizens Women did not get the vote until the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. 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. Document 4 Brown v. Board of Education, 17 May 1954 The Brown decision outlawed segregation in schools and undermined the notion of‘separate but equaV. In reversing its earlier decision, the Court pointed to the changed context of education in American society since Plessy and to new psychological evidence about the impact of segregation on schoolchildren. MR...
eBook - ePub- James Daley(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...“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.” How can the State deny or abridge the right of the citizen, if the citizen does not possess it? There is no escape from the conclusion that to vote is the citizen’s right, and the specifications of race, color or previous condition of servitude can in no way impair the force of that emphatic assertion that the citizen’s right to vote shall not be denied or abridged. The political strategy of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment failing to coerce the rebel States into enfranchising their negroes, and the necessities of the Republican party demanding their votes throughout the South to ensure the re-election of Grant in 1872, that party was compelled to place this positive prohibition of the Fifteenth Amendment upon the United States and all the States thereof. If once we establish the false principle that United States citizenship does not carry with it the right to vote in every State in this Union, there is no end to the petty tricks and cunning devices which will be attempted to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of suffrage. It will not always be the men combining to disfranchise all women; native born men combining to abridge the rights of all naturalized citizens, as in Rhode Island. It will not always be the rich and educated who may combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we may live to see the hard-working, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of numbers, combine and amend State constitutions so as to disfranchise the Vanderbilts, the Stewarts, the Conklings and the Fentons. It is a poor rule that won’t work more ways than one...
eBook - ePubHistory of Women's Marches – The Political Battle of Suffragettes (Complete 6 Volume Edition)
Including Documents, Images, Letters, Newspaper Articles, Conference Reports, Speeches, Court Transcripts, Laws… Up to Today's Equal Pay Issues & Latest Statistics
- Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Gage, Harriot Stanton Blatch, Ida H. Harper(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Madison & Adams Press(Publisher)
...Notwithstanding its apparent equity, the leaders of the National Association, including Miss Anthony herself, felt convinced after the decision against Mrs. Minor that it would be useless to expect from the Supreme Court any interpretation of the Constitution which would permit women to exercise the right of suffrage. They had learned, however, through the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, that it had been possible to amend this document in such a way as to enfranchise an entire new class of voters—or in other words to protect them in the exercise of a right which it seemed that in some mysterious way they already possessed. As the Fourteenth Amendment declared the negroes to be citizens, and the Fifteenth forbade the United States or any State to deny or abridge "the right of citizens of the United States to vote, on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude," it was clearly evident that this right inhered in citizenship. This being the case women must already have it, but as there was no national authority prohibiting the States from denying or abridging it, each of them did so by putting the word "male" in its constitution as a qualification for suffrage; just as many of them had used the word "white" until the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment by a three-fourths majority made this unconstitutional. Therefore, since the Minor vs. Happersett decision, the National Association has directed its principal efforts to secure from Congress the submission to the several State Legislatures of a Sixteenth Amendment which should prohibit disfranchisement on account of "sex," as the Fifteenth had done on account of "color." The association does not discourage attempts in various States to secure from their respective Legislatures the submission of an amendment to the voters which shall strike out this word "male" from their own constitutions...
eBook - ePub- Nancy A. Hewitt, Anne M. Valk, Nancy A. Hewitt, Anne M. Valk(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Suffragists also aided soldiers by serving as nurses and working for the US Sanitary Commission, fully expecting women’s rights issues to return to center stage after the war. The terrible war did indeed precipitate emancipation: self‐emancipation by enslaved blacks before and after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and a permanent end to slavery through the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Suffragists reasserted their agenda the next year when Mott, Stanton, Stone, and Anthony, along with Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and other activists formed the American Equal Rights Association to promote “universal suffrage”: the enfranchisement of African Americans of both sexes and women of all races. In 1867, however, efforts to enact universal suffrage by referendum in Kansas failed spectacularly. When the Fourteenth Amendment won approval in 1868, it confirmed the fears of some suffragists that women, white and black, would be left behind. It affirmed women’s status in that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were citizens but imposed penalties only if states denied voting rights “to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty‐one years of age, and citizens of the United States.” Not only had women failed to gain enfranchisement, but for the first time the Constitution explicitly sanctioned sex discrimination. As Faye Dudden (2011) details, the debate in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment brought these tensions to the breaking point. Leading Radical Republicans became convinced they could not secure rights for both freedpeople and white women. “This hour,” Wendell Phillips concluded, “belongs to the Negro” – that is, black men alone (DuBois 1999 : 59). Radical Republicans’ decision to seize the last moments of political daylight to enfranchise black men but no women triggered the suffrage movement’s fateful split...
