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The Fifteenth Amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This construction allowed states to continue to decide the qualifications of voters as long as those qualifications were ostensibly race-neutral. Thus, while states could not deny African American men the right to vote on the basis of race, they could deny it to women on the basis of sex or to people who could not prove they were literate.
Although the immediate effect of these provisions was quite profound, over time the Republicans in Congress gradually lost interest in pursuing Reconstruction policies, and the Reconstruction ended with the end of military rule in the South and the withdrawal of the Union army in 1877.
Erik Foner. 1988.
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 . New York: Harper&Row, 524–527. Following the army’s removal, political control of the South fell once again into the hands of white men, and violence was used to discourage blacks from exercising the rights they had been granted.
Ibid., 595; Alexander Keyssar. 2000.
The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States . New York: Basic Books, 105–106. The revocation of voting rights, or
disenfranchisement , took a number of forms; not every southern state used the same methods, and some states used more than one, but they all disproportionately affected black voter registration and turnout.
Keyssar, 114–115.
Perhaps the most famous of the tools of disenfranchisement were
literacy tests and
understanding tests . Literacy tests, which had been used in the North since the 1850s to disqualify naturalized European immigrants from voting, called on the prospective voter to demonstrate his (and later her) ability to read a particular passage of text. However, since voter registration officials had discretion to decide what text the voter was to read, they could give easy passages to voters they wanted to register (typically whites) and more difficult passages to those whose registration they wanted to deny (typically blacks). Understanding tests required the prospective voter to explain the
meaning of a particular passage of text, often a provision of the U.S. Constitution, or answer a series of questions related to citizenship. Again, since the official examining the prospective voter could decide which passage or questions to choose, the difficulty of the test might vary dramatically between white and black applicants.
Keyssar, 111–112. Even had these tests been administered fairly and equitably, however, most blacks would have been at a huge disadvantage, because few could read. Although schools for blacks had existed in some places, southern states had made it largely illegal to teach slaves to read and write. At the beginning of the Civil War, only 5 percent of blacks could read and write, and most of them lived in the North.
Kimberly Sambol-Tosco, “The Slave Experience: Education, Arts, and Culture,” http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/education/history2.html (April 10, 2016). Some were able to take advantage of educational opportunities after they were freed, but many were not able to gain effective literacy.
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