Tennessee Becomes Last State to Ratify 15th Amendment — 127 Years Late!
Tennessee on this day became the last state to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been ratified on February 3, 1870.
The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed African-American menthe right to vote by declaring that 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.”
Women were not granted the right to vote until ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920.
Despite the Fifteenth Amendment, African-Americans were disenfranchised in states of the Old Confederacy between 1877 and 1965 through literacy tests, poll taxes, all-white primary elections, and terrorist attacks by the KKK and other groups. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on August 6, 1965 ended these discriminatory actions. The law resulted in the election of innumerable African-American officials to offices from school boards, to city councils, and the U.S. Congress throughout the south.
Beginning in the 1980s, however, conservatives began enacting a number of procedures, labeled “voter suppression,” designed to once again prevent or discourage African-Americans from voting.
Read: Chandler Davidson and Bernard Groffman, Quiet Revolution in the South: The Impact of the Voting Rights Act, 1965-1990 (1994)
Learn about the Fifteenth Amendment: William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (1965)
Learn more: Ari Berman, Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2015)
Read: Steven Lawson, Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969 (1976)f