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I chose this amendment because looking at it quickly it seems like it is a step in the right direction towards a better democracy. However, discriminatory practices were put in place to prevent and discourage Black citizens from voting. The amendment states "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. Many were opposed to this amendment, especially in the South. A democracy is a government by the people, however, this still was not happening as proportional as it should have with the this amendment. Not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 did African Americans truly get the right to vote without anyone deterring them. This amendment still did not include the right to vote for women and that would not be ratified for years to come.

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The 15th Amendment, which sought to protect the voting rights of Black men after the Civil War, was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, within a few years numerous discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South. It wasn't until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that legal barriers were outlawed at the state and local levels if they denied any Americans their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

What Is the 15th Amendment?

The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states: "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."

Despite the amendment's passage, by the late 1870s dozens of discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South.
READ MORE: When Did African Americans Get the Right to Vote?
Reconstruction

In 1867, following the American Civil War and the abolishment of slavery, the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress passed the First Reconstruction Act over the veto of President Andrew Johnson. The act divided the South into five military districts and outlined how new governments based on universal suffrage for men were to be established.

With the adoption of the 15th Amendment in 1870, a politically mobilized Black community joined with white allies in the Southern states to elect the Republican Party to power, which brought about radical changes across the South. By late 1870, all the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and most were controlled by the Republican Party thanks to the support of Black voters.
WATCH: Yohuru Williams on the 15th Amendment
In the same year, Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Natchez, Mississippi, became the first African American to sit in the U.S. Congress when he was elected to the U.S. Senate. Although Black Republicans never obtained political office in proportion to their overwhelming electoral majority, Revels and a dozen other Black men served in Congress during Reconstruction, more than 600 served in state legislatures and many more held local offices.

Did you know? One day after it was ratified, Thomas Mundy Peterson of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, became the first Black person to vote under the authority of the 15th Amendment.

Poll Taxes and Literacy Tests

By the late 1870s, the Southern Republican Party vanished with the end of Reconstruction, and Southern state governments effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (passed in 1868, it guaranteed citizenship and all its privileges to Black Americans) and the 15th amendment, effectively stripping Black citizens in the South of the right to vote.

In the ensuing decades, a range of discriminatory practices including poll taxes and literacy tests-along with Jim Crow laws, intimidation, threats and outright violence-were used to prevent Black men from exercising their right to vote.
READ MORE: Reconstruction: A Timeline of the Post-Civil War Era
Voting Rights Act of 1965

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, aimed to overcome all legal barriers at the state and local levels that denied Blacks their right to vote under the 15th Amendment.

The act banned the use of literacy tests, provided for federal oversight of voter registration in areas where less than 50 percent of the non-white population had not registered to vote and authorized the U.S. attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.

In 1964, the 24th Amendment made poll taxes illegal in federal elections; poll taxes in state elections were banned in 1966 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

After the passage of the Voting Rights Act, state and local enforcement of the law was weak and it often was ignored outright, mainly in the South and in areas where the proportion of Black citizens in the population was high and their vote threatened the political status quo.

Still, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 gave Black American voters the legal means to challenge voting restrictions and vastly improved voter turnout.

Sources

The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution. National Geographic.
15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Primary Documents in American History. Library of Congress.

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The 15th Amendment, which sought to protect the voting rights of Black men after the Civil War, was adopted into the U.S. Constitution in 1870. Despite the amendment, within a few years numerous discriminatory practices were used to prevent Black citizens from exercising their right to vote, especially in the South.

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The 19th Amendment finally extended the right to vote to women. A step towards a more representative democracy. Women make up half of the population and excluding them from voting solely because of their gender takes away what a democracy is all about: a government ruled by the people. Women still would not be able to serve in government for a few more years. It took a long time for people to finally listen and act on this. The women who fought so long for this even though they could not vote at the time were contributing to democracy by standing up for what they believed was right and fair.

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Credit... Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times

Opinion
A century later, it's past time to recognize the women of color who were sidelined in the fight for gender and racial equality.

Credit... Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times

Historians who specialize in voting rights and African-American women's history have played a welcome and unusually public role in combating the myths that have long surrounded the women's suffrage movement and the 19th Amendment, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Tuesday.

In the lead-up to this centennial, these same campaigning historians have warned against celebrations and proposed monuments to the suffrage movement that seemed destined to render invisible the contributions of African-American women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Mary Church Terrell, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells - all of whom played heroic roles in the late 19th- and early 20th-century struggles for women's rights and universal human rights. In addition to speaking up for Black women of the past, these scholars have performed a vital public service by debunking the most pernicious falsehood about the 19th Amendment: that it concluded a century-long battle for equality by guaranteeing women the right to vote.

Americans who imbibed this fiction in civics classes are caught off guard when they hear the more complicated truth - that millions of women had won voting rights before the 19th Amendment was ratified, and millions more remained shut out of the polls after ratification. Indeed, as middle-class white women celebrated ratification by parading through the streets, African-American women in the Jim Crow South who had worked diligently for women's rights found themselves shut out of the ballot box for another half century - and abandoned by white suffragists who declared their mission accomplished the moment middle-class white women achieved the franchise.

As the distinguished historian Nancy Hewitt has shown, a lengthy campaign and a range of subsequent laws was required to fully open ballot access to others, including Black women, Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, Chinese-Americans and Korean-Americans. Among those necessary laws were the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943 and the adoption of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 24th Amendment in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, along with its amendments of 1970 and 1975. In other words, the 19th Amendment was one step in a long, racially fraught battle for voting rights that seemed secure a few decades ago but face a grave threat today.

The white suffrage heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony got a stranglehold on the historical record in 1881, when they inaugurated the first volume of what would eventually become the influential six-volume "History of Woman Suffrage." The duo and their comrades established an enduring, self-serving legacy when they designated a meeting at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 - a meeting that Stanton and her collaborator Lucretia Mott attended - as the starting point of the women's rights movement. In fact, the movement already was stirring in various forms, and in various places.

"History of Woman Suffrage" provides a minutely detailed account of a movement that implicitly defined women as people who were white and middle class and renders prominent African-Americans virtually invisible. For a long time, historians who relied on this history duplicated its omissions. The African-American historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, who died last year at the age of 77, discredited this lily-white version of events by uncovering more than 100 Black suffragists. In recent decades, historians have shown that Black women were erased partly because they sensibly argued that gender discrimination and racism were interconnected problems that could not be neatly separated.

Books and studies timed to coincide with the 19th Amendment's centennial are rendering ever more candid and inclusive versions of this story. In " Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement," for example, the historian Cathleen Cahill foregrounds the suffrage struggles of women of color as they played out in New York City's Chinatown, New Mexico and elsewhere. Ms. Cahill shows how white suffragists worked with - and sometimes against - marginalized women, including Native Americans and Mexican-Americans.

In the forthcoming book "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All," the historian Martha S. Jones offers a version of the suffrage and voting rights story that begins well before the 1848 meeting at Seneca Falls. The history she recounts continues into the 1960s and '70s with the work of revered African-American civil rights organizers like Septima Clark and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Ms. Jones argues that the elided Black women were at the forefront of the quest for women's rights and were overlooked in history because they achieved their victories in civic and political organizations on the Black side of the color line. Invisibility aside, she writes, African-American women "pointed the nation toward its best ideals. They were the first to reject arbitrary distinctions, including racism and sexism, as rooted in outdated and disproved fictions. They were the nation's original feminists and antiracists, and they built a movement on these core principles."

The Seneca Falls convention concerned itself with a number of women's rights issues, including ecclesiastical policies that excluded women from authority in churches. By then, Ms. Jones writes, Black women in the African Methodist Episcopal Church had capped years of skillful organizing and alliance building by persuading church leaders to grant them licenses to preach. This achievement was built on the singular accomplishments of Jarena Lee, who in 1819 - after years of rejection - became the first woman authorized to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The ever-broadening story of the women's rights struggle is opening public awareness to other standout Black women as well. One of them is Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who received a belated Times obituary two years ago. Cary was one of the first female lawyers in the country and is described as the first Black woman in North America to edit and publish a newspaper. The paper, known as The Provincial Freeman, was founded in Canada in 1853 and became a forum for women to discuss their lives. In a letter to the editor, one woman, Dolly Bangs, told readers that it was counterproductive to discourage women from leadership roles in the "afternoon of the 19th century." She urged women to take their fate into their own hands: "It is her right, as her duty, to press boldly forward to her appointed task, otherwise who is guilty of burying her talent?"

Among the rising stars Cary championed in The Freeman was the African-American poet and anti-slavery orator Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, who would go on to an illustrious career. In 1866, Harper rattled the white suffrage elite in a prophetic speech delivered at the founding conclave of the American Equal Rights Association. She argued that the destinies of Black and white, rich and poor, were "all bound up together" - and that racism was in fact a white women's issue. Ticking off the abuses Black women suffered daily, she thundered: "You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs."

Harper did not live to witness the unsettling contrast between scenes of middle-class white women celebrating the 19th Amendment with ticker tape parades and Southern Black women being driven from the polls under threat of bodily harm. A half-century after ratification, when African-Americans were still being beaten and murdered for seeking the vote, the charismatic organizer Fannie Lou Hamer did not stand on the 19th Amendment. As Ms. Jones writes: "Yes, she was a woman. But she did not see the terms of the Nineteenth Amendment - the one that constitutionalized women's voting rights - as protecting her."

The 19th Amendment can fairly be seen as an important milestone in an unfinished journey. It is morally repugnant and counterproductive to mythologize it as a triumph of egalitarianism at a time when the voting rights Hamer and others paid for in blood are under attack in the courts and in state legislatures all over the United States. This disturbing fact needs to remain uppermost in mind as the country unveils its new suffrage monuments and holds its celebratory events.

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Opinion | The 19th Amendment: An Important Milestone in an Unfinished Journey (Published 2020)

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Opinion A century later, it's past time to recognize the women of color who were sidelined in the fight for gender and racial equality. Credit... Nicholas Konrad/The New York Times Historians who specialize in voting rights and African-American women's history have played a welcome and unusually public role in combating the myths that have long surrounded the women's suffrage movement and the 19th Amendment, which celebrates its 100th anniversary on Tuesday.

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The Voting Rights Act of 1965 ended discrimination in voting mostly among African Americans in hopes to increase their involvement in their right to vote. The more recent court case Shelby County vs. Holder destroyed the protection that allowed the government to block discriminatory election laws. It was an ignorant decision that believed the best in America, which sadly was not true. This Act was put in place to protect the democracy of the people. Democracy is a more representative involvement in government through voting and by not having a racial group that makes up a large portion of our population, our democracy is hurt. It is not only your duty to vote as an American but it is also for you to make sure that you are protecting yourself by using your voice to vote. Although this Act has been violated, its purpose strengthen our democracy.

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Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, one of the most successful civil rights laws in our nation's history. The Act was designed to curb discrimination in voting and bring equality to the ballot box for all Americans, regardless of the color of one's skin. It was the culmination of more than a century of battles for black voting rights.

But two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Shelby County vs. Holder, gutted a key provision of the law. The decision came amid a new wave of laws restricting voting, the most since the Jim Crow era. The ruling destroyed a core protection that allowed the federal government, in certain places, to block discriminatory election laws before they had a chance to hurt voters.

Now, advocates are waging battles in the courts to save what is left of the Act, and calling on Congress to restore this protection to ensure voting can remain equal for all.

Our country has a long history of keeping certain people away from the ballot box. Initially, only white male landowners could vote. Black men could vote after the Civil War. For a time, many did. But soon, the Jim Crow era took hold and Southern states passed discriminatory laws and carried out a campaign of violence and intimidation aimed at preventing them from doing so. Black voter registration and political representation plummeted, and stayed that way for nearly a century.

Starting in the 1950s, the Civil Rights Movement began to make gains. Voter registration was a key goal to advance equality. One Sunday in 1965, a bloody march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., brought dramatic attention to the cause. Americans across the country, white and black, watched as police officers beat and tear-gassed innocent people. The public outcry helped put pressure on lawmakers to pass the Voting Rights Act, which Johnson signed on Aug. 6, 1965.

The Act unleashed the potential inherent in American democracy. It was instantly effective. The gap between white and black registration rates dropped from nearly 30 percentage points in the early 1960s to just eight by the 1970s. Turnout among black voters shot up significantly. The black-white turnout gap in the South, approximately 50 percentage points in the mid-1950s, was effectively eliminated.

Over the years, as demographics have shifted, the Voting Rights Act has also expanded to include protections for Hispanics and language minorities, furthering the promise of equality for all at the ballot box.

Section 5 of the Act was particularly instrumental in achieving these remarkable successes. Under this part of the law, jurisdictions with a history of discrimination against African Americans were required to seek approval, or "preclearance," from either the Department of Justice or a federal court in Washington, D.C., for any changes to their election practices before they could put them into effect.

This was critical. It blocked and deterred discriminatory election practices - such as last-minute changes to polling locations, or consolidating districts, which could dilute minority voting strength - that earlier litigation, brought after the fact, could do little to remedy. Before 1965, when one discriminatory voting practice was blocked through litigation, defendants could turn around and adopt a slightly different restriction in its place. Section 5 aimed to bring this gamesmanship to end.

The VRA was enacted with strong bipartisan support, and Congress has reauthorized it four times. During the last reauthorization, in 2006, Congress examined thousands of pages of evidence showing that discrimination still exists and the Act was still vital. The Senate voted 98-0, and the House 390-33, to continue it for another 25 years.

Despite all this, some opponents have been skeptical of the ongoing need for these protections in the current day. And in 2013, with the support of the Supreme Court, they succeeded. The Court struck down Section 4, the formula laying out which jurisdictions had to seek federal approval for election law changes, rendering Section 5 inoperable - like a computer without an operating system.

A 5-4 majority looked at improvements in black voter registration rates and the eradication of restrictions like the poll tax to find that the "conditions that originally justified [Section 5] no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions."

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg decried that the majority was holding the Act's own success against it. "Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes," she responded, "is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

At its heart, the disagreement boils down to whether, as a nation, we still need federal protections against the possibility of racial discrimination in voting. Although we have come a long way since the 1960s, the past few years have shown that major racial divisions still exist. They may even have gotten worse since 2013, as large majorities of white and black Americans now view race relations as "generally bad," according to a recent poll.

The recent rash of discriminatory voting laws, unleashed by the Shelby County decision, does not help. States have used the court's implicit approval as justification to pass strict measures. These may not be as obviously discriminatory as literacy tests, but they similarly prevent people from voting.

For example, mere hours after the high court ruling, Texas implemented a strict photo ID law, which had previously been rejected under Section 5. That summer, the North Carolina legislature passed a sweeping law that also instituted a stringent photo ID requirement, eliminated same-day registration, and cut back on early voting.

All of these laws respond to phantom complaints of voter fraud, and all disproportionately hurt the ability of minorities to vote. In October 2014, a federal judge found 600,000 registered Texas voters do not have acceptable ID. Testimony showed African-American and Hispanic registered voters are two to four times more likely than white registered voters to lack photo ID. In North Carolina, data showed African Americans used early voting and same-day registration at much higher rates than whites.

Overall, since the 2010 election, 21 states have imposed new voting restrictions. In 2016, 15 states will have more strict rules than they did in 2012. The storm of discriminatory changes forecast by Ginsburg has apparently come to pass.

Many of these measures have been aggressively challenged under the remaining sections of the Voting Rights Act. Two major cases are pending in Texas and North Carolina, where attorneys laid out strong evidence showing how these laws prevent citizens from voting, and disproportionately discriminate against blacks and Hispanics.

Take Sammie Louise Bates, a witness in the Texas trial in September 2014. As the only one in her family who attended school, in a small town in Mississippi, Bates helped her grandmother count out her poll tax, a fee imposed with the intent to discourage black voters from voting

This made her angry - and inspired her to become a lifelong voter. But in 2013, Texas's new photo ID law prevented her from casting a ballot. She had her voter registration card, containing her name and current address, and an Illinois photo ID - both of which would have been sufficient to prove her identity in prior elections. But when she tried to get a Texas ID, she kept running into the same obstacle: She needed to obtain her Mississippi birth certificate, which would cost $42.

"I had to put $42 where it was doing the most good," she stated. "It was feeding my family, because we couldn't eat the birth certificate. That's for sure. And we couldn't pay rent with the birth certificate."

Bates was one of approximately 16 witnesses who testified about the difficulties they personally faced in obtaining acceptable ID, ranging from insufficient funds to endless red tape. After hearing multiple expert analyses, Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos struck down the law in October 2014 as discriminatory under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Yet, despite this evidence, the Supreme Court allowed it to remain in effect for the November 2014 election, pending an appeal that has still not been resolved.

This highlights the single most important loss in the Supreme Court's Shelby County decision. Before, voting laws could not go into effect in certain jurisdictions until the state had demonstrated they did not discriminate. After the ruling, laws must be challenged in case-by-case litigation that is costly and can take years. As a result, those measures can remain on the books to disenfranchise voters like Bates. And there's no guarantee that a victory won't simply give way to additional restrictions.

Another major lawsuit is also pending in North Carolina, where a trial just wrapped up. Its laws are also being challenged under the remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. At least one of these cases is likely to make it to the Supreme Court. What the court decides will determine not just the fate of those laws, but what is left of the Voting Rights Act.

Despite these fights, several states have advanced bipartisan reforms to modernize voter registration in recent years. They seek to streamline the process and increase access for all voters. Oregon, for example, passed a law to automatically sign up eligible citizens in the motor vehicle database. Hillary Clinton recently embraced a form of automatic and universal registration. Rand Paul supports restoring voting rights to some people with past convictions. Other states have expanded early voting opportunities and moved registration online.

But while all leaders should work to create a voting system that works well for everyone, they must also fight for one that discriminates against no one.

We have been painfully and repeatedly reminded in recent days and months about the continuing necessity of working for racial justice and equality in America. The Voting Rights Act, which gets at the core of democracy, is essential to the fight.

At the 50th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery earlier this year, civil rights leaders convening in Alabama were united around this common purpose. This time, however, instead of seeking passage of the Voting Rights Act, they sought its restoration.

Whatever one's views of the Shelby County decision, and however one feels about the Court's view that "our country has changed," there is no question the Supreme Court believes Congress has the power to act. It practically invited action by acknowledging that "while any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions."

Today, Congress has introduced two separate bills - the Voting Rights Amendment Act and the Voting Rights Advancement Act - that would restore the lost protections of Section 5, making it operative once again, and modernize the Voting Rights Act for the 21st century. On this historic anniversary for our country, Congress should move swiftly to restore the lost promise of the Voting Rights Act.
Theodore M. Shaw is the Julius L. Chambers Distinguished Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Civil Rights at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Law. He served as director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund from 2004 to 2008.

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50 Years Later, Voting Rights Act Under Unprecedented Assault

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Fifty years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, one of the most successful civil rights laws in our nation's history. The Act was designed to curb discrimination in voting and bring equality to the ballot box for all Americans, regardless of the color of one's skin.

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Before the 26 Amendment was passed in 1971, the voting age was 21. Many were enraged because the draft age had been lowered during WWII to 18. Many of the men and women who were drafted wanted to vote because they were old enough to fight and therefore should have the right to vote. Many were angered and urged the government to lower the voting age so that they could have a say in government earlier. Democracy would be strengthened with the passing of this amendment because the population would be more represented and participatory in government.

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The movement to lower the voting age began to gain grassroots traction when newly-elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his support in his 1954 State of the Union address: "For years our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have, in time of peril, been summoned to fight for America. They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons. I urge Congress to propose to the States a constitutional amendment permitting citizens to vote when they reach the age of 18."

Still, it would not be until much of the American public became disillusioned by the lengthy and costly war in Vietnam in the mid 1960s that the movement to lower the voting age gained widespread public support. "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote" found its way back into the American consciousness in the form of protest signs and chants. Then-Senator Randolph and other politicians continued to push legislation to lower the age to 18, including passing an amendment into 1965's Voting Rights Act in 1970 that applied lowering the age to federal, state, and local elections. Even as he signed the amendment into law, President Richard Nixon issued a public statement that the federal government regulating state and local elections was likely to be deemed unconstitutional and that only an amendment would secure this right. He was right, and the amendment was struck down in the 1970 Supreme Court case Oregon v. Mitchell, ruling that the federal government could not make mandates for state and local elections. The result was a mixed system in which state and local elections had different rules than federal elections, which resulted in logistical problems on election days in states across the country. Protests and lobbying efforts, largely led by activists from the National Education Association and their allies such as the AFL-CIO and the NAACP, resumed in large numbers, as men between the ages of 18 and 20 feared their draft numbers being called despite having no say in electing their representation. Dubbed "Project 18," the pressure continued to mount for legislators to take action. Regional chapters of the NAACP organized youth conferences and marches in Chapel Hill, Washington, D.C., and other major cities around the country.

On March 10, 1971, the Senate voted unanimously in favor of a Constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to 18, followed by an overwhelming majority of the House voting in favor on March 23. The states swiftly ratified the amendment, and it took effect on July 1, 1971, nearly 30 years after Senator Randolph first proposed lowering the voting age. In response to its passing, the senator reflected "I believe that our young people possess a great social conscience, are perplexed by the injustices which exist in the world and are anxious to rectify these ills."

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"Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote": The WWII Roots of the 26th Amendment | The National WWII Museum | New Orleans

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The movement to lower the voting age began to gain grassroots traction when newly-elected President Dwight D. Eisenhower expressed his support in his 1954 State of the Union address: "For years our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have, in time of peril, been summoned to fight for America.

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Stacey Abrams has done a large amount of work to fight voter suppression, which has still been happening despite the prior legislation that has been passed. Democracy is engaging everyone in the decision-making of our country and in the past few years it has been hurt. Specifically, in the pandemic, many fought against mail-in ballots because they thought it was cause voter fraud, however, it hurt many voters who could not get out to vote because of the pandemic or other issues. It is important that we continue to work towards ending voter suppression to strengthen our democracy and allow everyone to vote fairly.

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Stacey Abrams on Voter Suppression in 21st-Century America