Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Impact

Although the Fifteenth Amendment successfully enfranchised northern Blacks, its long-term impact on African Americans in the South for its first one hundred years was negligible. Congress initially adopted Enforcement Acts between 1866 and 1875 designed to prevent obstruction to federal voting, but once northern troops left the South in 1877, whites who had once supported the Confederacy struggled to regain their power. They effectively evaded the force of the Fifteenth Amendment through adoption of numerous stratagems left open when Congress omitted restrictions on property or educational qualifications. The Supreme Court decision in Ex parte Yarbrough (1884) was one of the few cases where the Court upheld federal laws restricting private actions aimed at denying African American voting rights.

Literacy tests, often administered in a highly discriminatory fashion, were used to keep both lower-class whites and Blacks from voting. Many states further combined them with grandfather clauses, which the U.S. Supreme Court did not invalidate until Guinn v. United States (1915); such clauses exempted individuals whose grandfathers had voted—at a time when only whites could vote—from such literacy tests. States also adopted poll taxes, which they sometimes made cumulative so that individuals who wanted to vote had to pay the tax not only for that year but also for previous years in which they had not voted. Other states added additional obstacles to voter registration. In still others, racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan used physical violence to intimidate Black voters. As the Democratic Party increasingly dominated the South (so that the winners of the Democratic primary almost always won in general elections), it, too, cooperated in Black disenfranchisement by excluding Blacks until the Supreme Court finally outlawed the practice in Smith v. Allwright (1944).

Although the nation never returned to chattel slavery, judicial interpretations of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were extremely limited by the end of the nineteenth century. In the Civil Rights Cases of 1883 the Court decided that the amendments covered only state as opposed to private actions. By 1896 the Court used the doctrine of “separate but equal” to approve the developing system of racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Court did not reverse course until its historic 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which finally began the long process of desegregation.

The Fifteenth Amendment proved so ineffective in its first century that Goldwin Smith, a British-born barrister who presented plans for reforming the Constitution in 1898, favorably cited a petition by Louisiana and other states to repeal it. Ironically, at about the same time, a number of attorneys unsuccessfully argued that the amendment had been so revolutionary and so contrary to American federalism that it had violated implicit constitutional limitations on the constitutional amending process.

However impotent it seemed, in time the amendment provided authority not only for some of the Supreme Court decisions that invalidated its evasions but also for congressional legislation. In 1957 Congress adopted the first of a number of civil rights acts designed to overcome the paucity of southern African American voters. These acts reached their high point with the adoption of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Relying on congressional enforcement powers in Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment, this law suspended the use of literacy tests in seven southern states and used U.S. marshals to register voters. The law further prohibited states from adopting new laws that might restrict Black suffrage without federal clearance. Justice Hugo Black was the only justice to object to this provision when the Supreme Court upheld this and other provisions in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966). Congress subsequently extended the Voting Rights Act in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006.

In 1964 the Twenty-fourth Amendment prohibited the imposition of poll taxes in federal elections. Relying chiefly on the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court subsequently extended this ban to state elections in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966).

Since the Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Carr (1962) ruling that issues of state legislative apportionment are justiciable (that is, subject to judicial intervention), the Supreme Court has increasingly overseen state plans for legislative apportionment. In recent years, it has looked with increased suspicion at plans that used racial classifications to configure districts, sometimes even in cases where states used such plans to increase rather than to restrict minority representation. The Court has clearly understood the Fifteenth Amendment as giving it a broad mandate to oversee voting issues.