Why was the Fifteenth Amendment important?

0:06When the Southern state governments, established by Andrew Johnson rejected the 14th Amendment, and they rejected it by gigantic margins, so some legislature was the vote was like 140 to three or something like that. White 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.

0:37But 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. Suddenly, 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.

1:08The Reconstruction Act does not apply to them, it only applies to the ex Confederate states. So you had this 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, and the 15th Amendment says no state can deny to any person or any citizen the right to vote on account of race. They can still regulate the right to vote in all sorts of 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 again outraged because the 15th Amendment certainly allows states to deny women the right to vote,

2:11and all of them did, as I mentioned before. But with the 15th Amendment, Black male suffrage came to the entire nation. In 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, only five states, all in New England, allowed Black men the right to vote and there the Black population was tiny. Now, suddenly, 1870, 10 years later, the 15th Amendment is ratified and Black men can now vote throughout the entire country.

2:43In some states, they were a majority of the electorate in Mississippi, and South Carolina, Louisiana, a majority of the adult men are African American and they now have the right to vote. This inaugurates a period of what I call in my book, a period of interracial democracy. For the first time in American history, Black and White took part in government, sat in political conventions next to each other, held public office in large numbers, and by the tens of thousands, voted in elections. This was a fundamental change in the body politic of the United States.