What were the practical effects of the Fifteenth Amendment?
About this video
Despite violence from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the 14th and 15th Amendments, the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Enforcement Acts gave Black Southerners real political power for a time under President Grant. The speaker argues Reconstruction's later collapse was a failure of enforcement, not of the amendments, which the courts finally began enforcing in the 1950s and 1960s.
You'll be able to
- describe the laws and amendments that supported Black political participation during Reconstruction.
- explain the speaker's argument that Reconstruction's failure was a failure of enforcement.
- describe when the courts began to enforce the amendments again.
Key words
- Enforcement Acts
- Laws passed by Congress to punish violence used to stop people exercising their constitutional rights.
- Jim Crow laws
- Southern laws that enforced racial segregation and suppressed Black rights.
- enforcement
- Making sure a law is actually obeyed.
Transcript
Of course, there was still terrible violence in the South. You had an early rise of the Ku Klux Klan. There were people in the South who resisted the idea of equality for Blacks and they were willing to take violent efforts to suppress Black participation, but it didn't gain traction, as bad as it was, with the passage of the 1866 Civil Rights Act, with the adoption of the 14th Amendment, and the 15th Amendment, with the adoption of new legislation from Congress, the Enforcement Acts, which enforced laws which prohibited violence suppressing the exercise of Constitutional rights as to the Anti-Ku Klux Klan Act. Under President Grant, for a period of time, black political power in the South was having an extraordinary impact and they were framing their own constitutions and participating in the framing of their own constitutions and local policy.
The passage of these amendments had real effect. Sometimes constitutional reconstruction is described as a failure. It's described as a failure because we know in the decades that eventually came along, the enforcement stopped and the rise of violent suppression of equal Black civil rights in the South under Jim Crow laws became endemic, and then lasted for decades until around World War II and then the 1950s and the civil rights era. But that was a failure of enforcement.
The addition of the amendments, the possibility of the amendments, and the ability of these amendments to bring equality in civil rights and in political participation were real and really a part of American history and were brought to bear and were successfully adopted due to the actions of Black Americans, White Americans, men and women. We should celebrate what they did, even as we lament the period of non-enforcement that then doesn't change until finally you get to the 1950s and 1960s, the court wakes up and begins to enforce what? Begins to enforce the amendments that Black Americans and White Americans fought so hard to make a part of the Constitution.
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