The 15th amendment was adopted on February 3rd 1870. It said " The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by State in account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It also gives the congress the power to enforce the amendment. This amendment didn"t give the blacks a right to hold office. This is the last of three so-called reconstruction amendments. This was adopted because the blacks had been freed but they had no rights. And they were treated like dirt. .
The Southern states used a lot of different ways to keep blacks from voting, and even some of the Northern states would beat the people that wanted to vote. They made poll taxes, literacy tests, property ownership, grandfather clause, and they would beat the people when they went to vote. Women fought against this amendment, because they were not included in it.
The conditions that existed in the United States at the time were the reconstruction of the Northern and Southern states after the Civil War. African Americans have just been freed and made citizens by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Southern white people still treated the blacks like they did before the Civil War. .
Most whites in the Southern states and some in the Northern states were against this amendment. They didn"t want black people to become more powerful than them. Whites were afraid that the blacks would overrule them and treat them the same way that we treated them.
This amendment hadn"t really taken affect until a century later. In 1965 The "Voting Rights Act" was passed to raise the black voter registration by giving power to the Justice Department to closely monitor voting qualifications. It affected the Nation by giving power to black people and making them equal to us.
It affected the black people greatly. It enabled them to hold some power to decide what they wanted and how they wanted to be treated, by voting.
