The 15th Amendment and the Black Vote in America

In 1870, one hundred and fifty years ago, Congress ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution allowing African American men to be elected or appointed to national, state, county, and local offices throughout the United States. One hundred years ago, African American women won the vote although it would be years before many could exercise that right.

The 15th amendment was the beginning of a struggle for equality that would continue for more than a century before African Americans could begin to participate fully in American politics. Some African Americans exercised their voting rights and even held offices in many Southern states through the 1880s, but in the early 1890s, steps were taken to reverse the little progress that had been made by black people in the United States.

The black vote was suppressed by requiring literacy tests, “grandfather clauses” excluded all whose ancestors had not voted in the 1860s, and many states and local councils passed laws and ordinances that were designed to frustrate black voters including ‘Jim Crow’ laws in southern states. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, abolished all remaining deterrents to exercising the right to vote for African Americans.

THE FIRST BLACK CONGRESSMAN

On January 20, 1870, the Mississippi state legislature appointed Hiram Revels to a seat in the U.S. Senate that had remained vacant ever since Mississippi seceded from the Union nearly a decade earlier. Senator Hiram Revels of Mississippi was a North Carolina–born preacher and the first African American to serve in Congress. Revels’s time in office was short-lived; when his appointment expired the following year, a leading white Republican, former Confederate general James Alcorn, took his place for a full six-year term. But by then Joseph Rainey, an African-American Republican from South Carolina, had won election to the House, beginning what would become an eight-and-a-half-year career in Congress.