U.S. Constitution Made No Actual

¶ … U.S. Constitution made no actual comment or mention on the suffrage and voting rights and these were left to the States's jurisdiction. This meant that the enslaved African-American population did not have any rights in this sense and, further more, there were additional restrictions to voting rights, including income and property. The right to vote could not be achieved by the African-American population, since, in 1857, the Supreme Court had ruled on the famous Dred Scott case, deciding that "that no State can, by any act or law of its own, passed since the adoption of the constitution, introduce a new member into the political community created by the constitution of the United States" and, as such, that no African-American could obtain and detain citizenship of the United States.

Following the logical fact that no one who was not citizen of the United States could have fundamental rights, such as the right to vote (that by the Civil War were extended to all White males), the suffrage question for the Black population was never in question until during the Civil War.

However, the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the approval by the Congress of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), both of which abolished slavery, marked a new phase for the African-American community on their way to achieving the right to vote. The Thirteenth Amendment, outlawing slavery, was ratified on December 18, 1865 and laid the path for action in 1866.

Indeed, in February 1866, Frederick Douglas and a delegation of African-Americans met with Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, to argument the Black's right to vote. Albeit the President's opposition, the delegation had given a clear signal from the Black community and the Congress took notice by passing the Civil Rights Act in April 1866. Vetoed by President Johnson at first, who stated that "the bill in effect proposes a discrimination against large numbers of intelligent, worthy, and patriotic foreigners, and in favor of the Negro, to whom, after long years of bondage, the avenues to freedom and intelligence have just now been suddenly opened," the Act was passed.

The Act states that "all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power (...) are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens shall have the same right, in every State and Territory in the United States." Although this Act guaranteed the same rights to the Black population as the White population already had, here including the right to vote, and despite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment marked this in the Constitution, there was more to be done towards actually receiving suffrage.

First, the Congress gave the right of vote to black citizens in the District of Columbia, although President Johnson had again vetoed the decision. However, the right to vote at national level for the African-American population was only acknowledged with the approval and subsequent ratification of the Fifteenth Constitutional Amendment, in 1869.

Brief and to the point, the Fifteenth Amendment had but two sections. The first was the most important and mentioned 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." Although the Fifteenth Amendment was a step forward, many institutions, including the Supreme Court on several occasions, stated that the Amendment did not necessarily give the right to vote to all citizens, but that it merely conferred the right to be "exempted from discrimination." This judicial controversy meant several additional decades when the African-American population could not always exercise their constitutional right to vote because of a small judicial subtlety.

On the other hand, the Fifteenth Amendment passed into the hand of the Federal government the right "to legislate qualifications for voting, a right formerly left to the states" and this meant that federal institutions could, at times, intervene when constitutional prerogatives were broken and when actions were taken in the South to limit Blacks' voting rights.

Let's have a brief analysis of several means that were used against Black suffrage. The first and easiest to use subterfuge was the literacy test. According to this, the voter was required to be able to read a section of the Constitution in order to be allowed to vote and on many, this test was imposed. Nevertheless, white voters usually avoided taking it, while black voters were held as illiterate and, according to the law, they could not vote.

One legal escape that was used was the so called grandfather clause. This ensured the fact that people that had been voters in the past or were descendants of people who had voted in the past (virtually the entire white population, that is), prior to the 1st of January 1867, could vote even if they did not pass the literacy test. Because the African-American population did not hold the suffrage until after this date, they obviously were not included in the respective category and failed the literacy test.

Additionally, in some States, a poll tax, charged before the vote for each voter, meant that poor Black voters could not afford to exercise their right. Of course, because of the non-discrimination imposed by the Fifteenth Amendment, this was often imposed on poor white people as well.