This Week in the United States - The 15th Amendment

This Week's Historical Theme: The United States

30 March 1870

A significant event throughout the history of the United States that occurred in March was the adoption of the 15th Amendment into the U.S Constitution. On 30 March 1870 the 15th Amendment (the last of the 3 Reconstruction Amendments) was passed by Congress and ratified, granting African American men the right to vote. The amendment followed the 13th Amendment (1865) which abolished slavery, and the 14th Amendment (1868) which granted African Americans full rights to citizenship. In the same year, Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Natchez Mississippi, became the first African American ever to sit in Congress.

Despite this, by the late 1970s support for Reconstruction was dwindling and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 marked the end of the Reconstruction Era. The individual state authority over their laws left the door open for southern state legislature to determine specific qualifications for suffrage. Such tactics used were literacy tests and poll taxes – as well as Jim Crow Laws and intimidation by white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan - which  disenfranchised a majority of Black votes in the decades following Reconstruction. It wasn't until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s that triggered the end of discriminatory voting practices with President Johnson signing the Voting Rights Act into law in 1965.

Want to find out more about the Reconstruction Amendments? Click here for more information, or here for more about the Voting Rights Act of 1965.