Constitution

The Fifteenth Amendment: Voting Rights Regardless of Race

The Fifteenth Amendment bars the United States and the states from denying the vote on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.

4Conservative Editors · Published November 8, 2026

The text

Passed by Congress February 26, 1869. Ratified February 3, 1870.

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--

Section 2.

The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

In plain English

Section 1. The right of citizens 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."

Section 2. Congress may enforce the Amendment by appropriate legislation.

Three points about what it does and does not do.

  • It does not create a general right to vote. The Constitution left voter qualifications to the states, and the Amendment forbids only discrimination on specified grounds.
  • It covers "denied or abridged," which includes laws that make voting harder as well as laws that bar it.
  • It binds states and the national government, but, as with other Reconstruction Amendments, its enforcement depended on Congress and the courts.

Women were not covered; the 19th Amendment addressed sex discrimination in 1920. The text of Section 1 ends with a dash in the Archives transcription, as the original does.

What the Founders said

The Amendment followed the Fourteenth by a year and a half. Republicans in Congress saw the vote as the protection for the freedmen and for the Reconstruction governments, and many Northern states did not themselves allow Black men to vote at the time.

Debate in Congress considered broader language that would have protected the right to vote and hold office, but the final text was a narrower ban on discrimination. Frederick Douglass argued that the ballot was essential to the freedmen's safety.

It was ratified on February 3, 1870, but within a generation the Southern states had found ways around it: literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and white primaries, enforced by intimidation and violence.

How the courts have read it

  • United States v. Reese (1876) and United States v. Cruikshank (1876): the Court narrowed federal enforcement, leaving the Amendment weak for decades.
  • Guinn v. United States (1915): Oklahoma's grandfather clause violated the Amendment.
  • Smith v. Allwright (1944): the white primary was unconstitutional.
  • Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960): a redrawing of city boundaries to exclude Black voters violated the Amendment.
  • South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966): the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a valid exercise of Congress's enforcement power.
  • Shelby County v. Holder (2013): the coverage formula in the Voting Rights Act was outdated and unconstitutional; Congress could write a new one.
  • Rice v. Cayetano (2000): Hawaii could not limit voting for a state agency's trustees to people of native Hawaiian ancestry.

Why it matters now

The Fifteenth Amendment states a principle on which Americans agree, and its history is a reminder that a constitutional right can fail if it is not enforced. The Amendment sat nearly dormant for ninety-five years until Congress passed the Voting Rights Act and the Court backed the law.

Modern disputes are about means. Questions of voter identification, registration lists, mail ballots and the preclearance system involve the balance between ballot access and election integrity. The Amendment forbids racial discrimination; it does not settle those policy choices, which belong largely to the states under the Elections Clause.

A conservative lesson might be the value of clear text and plain enforcement. The Amendment's promise was clear, and the failure was one of will. A legal order that depends on judicial interpretation alone will always be less secure than one in which citizens, legislators and officials share the principle.

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