How did the Fifteenth Amendment transform the Constitution?

0:05White Southerners just could not accept the principle of equal citizenship rights for the former slaves. Congress then said, we are going to create new governments in the South in which Black men will have the right to vote. But that only applied in the 10 of the 11 ex-Confederate states. Tennessee, for complicated reasons was now let back into the Union, and they didn't have to give Black men the right to vote. But the other 10 ex-Confederate states did.

0:37Suddenly Mississippi and Louisiana and Georgia and South Carolina are forced to create new governments with Black people voting. What's interesting is, many Northern states at this point, still didn't allow Black men to vote. The Reconstruction Act does not apply to them. It only applies to the ex-Confederate states. You had the strange circumstance whereby people who had been slaves up to just a year before are now allowed to vote. People who have been free their whole lives in the North still couldn't vote. It was a strange situation. But very soon after that, Congress enacts the 15th Amendment, which is meant to guarantee the right to vote for Black men throughout the country. The 15th Amendment says no state can deny to any person or any citizen the right to vote on account of race.

1:36They can still regulate the right to vote in all ways, but they cannot do it by purely racial legislation, saying white people can vote and Black people can no longer vote or cannot vote at all. The women's movement was outraged because the 15th Amendment certainly allows states to deny women the right to vote, and all of them did. But with the 15th Amendment, Black male suffrage came to the entire nation.