Voting Rights and Suppression
The 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote in 1870. Within a decade, states had built an entire machinery to take it back.
The 15th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on February 3, 1870.
It said that the right to vote could not be denied based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
It was a remarkable sentence for a country that had spent 250 years denying Black people nearly every legal right imaginable.
It lasted, in practice, about a decade.
By the 1880s, Southern states had developed what amounted to a second legal architecture designed to do what the 15th Amendment said they could not. Poll taxes required payment to vote, pricing out Black men who had been systematically excluded from economic opportunity. Literacy tests were administered selectively, with questions that were impossible by design for Black voters while white voters were waved through. Grandfather clauses allowed men to vote only if their grandfather had voted, which excluded every Black man descended from enslaved people.
Where legal barriers were not enough, violence filled the gap. The Ku Klux Klan and other groups murdered Black men who tried to register, burned their churches, and drove them from the polls. Local law enforcement looked the other way or participated directly.
The result was near-total disenfranchisement. In Mississippi in 1890, more than 190,000 Black men were eligible to vote. By 1892, fewer than 9,000 were registered.
This was not a failure of the Constitution. It was a deliberate dismantling of it.
The civil rights movement made voting rights central. Organizations like SNCC and the SCLC organized voter registration drives across the South, knowing that registration meant danger. Medgar Evers was murdered. Fannie Lou Hamer was beaten so severely after a registration attempt that she suffered permanent kidney damage. Four little girls were bombed in a Birmingham church. John Lewis's skull was fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. It was among the most consequential pieces of legislation in American history. It prohibited discriminatory voting practices and required states with a history of suppression to get federal pre-clearance before changing their election laws.
For nearly fifty years, it worked.
In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the pre-clearance provision in Shelby County v. Holder, ruling that the conditions that had justified it no longer existed. Within hours of the ruling, several states began implementing new restrictions.
The fight over voting rights is not finished. It was never finished.
Every generation has had to defend what the previous generation thought was settled.
They gave us the right to vote, and then spent the next hundred years making sure we could not use it.A recurring theme in the history of Black political participation
Voting rights are not a historical topic. They are a present-day reality.
Since the 2013 Shelby County decision, states have closed polling places, implemented strict voter ID requirements, purged voter rolls, and drawn district lines that dilute Black political power. These measures are legal. They are also, by documented evidence, disproportionately applied in ways that affect Black voters.
The argument against seeing this as suppression is that the laws apply to everyone. The argument for it is that they do not affect everyone equally, and the history of who gets to vote in America is too specific to pretend otherwise.
What is not disputed is this: the right to vote is the foundation of every other right in a democracy. It is how communities protect themselves from policy, demand accountability, and participate in the decisions that shape their lives.
Black Americans have fought, bled, and died for that right. Repeatedly. In every generation.
That history deserves to be remembered by everyone who shows up to vote.