Fifteenth Amendment

The 1870 amendment protecting the vote regardless of race

Overview

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, completing the constitutional Reconstruction trilogy. Its promise was hollowed by poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 supplied real enforcement, and the poll tax itself fell to the Twenty Fourth Amendment. It remains the textual foundation of American federal voting rights enforcement. Congress wrote a second section granting enforcement power, anticipating that states would evade with face neutral tricks.