Fifteenth Amendment, Section 1 — Right to Vote

Amdt15.S1.1 Right to Vote Clause Generally

In its initial interpretations of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court emphasized its aspect as a right exempting individuals from voter discrimination, rather than conferring a right to vote. “The Fifteenth Amendment,” it announced, did “not confer the right of suffrage upon any one,” but merely “invested the citizens of the United States with a new constitutional right which is . . . exemption from discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”¹ In subsequent cases, however, the Court, while conceding that the Amendment may have been originally construed as having been “designed primarily to prevent discrimination,” professed to be able “to see that under some circumstances it may operate as the immediate source of a right to vote.”²

Although “the immediate concern of the Amendment was to guarantee to the emancipated slaves the right to vote,” the Court has stated that the Amendment “is cast in fundamental terms, terms transcending the particular controversy,” and “grants protection to all persons, not just members of a particular race.”³ The Court has construed “race” broadly to include classifications based on ancestry as well as those based on race.⁴

Amdt15.S1.2 Grandfather Clauses

The history of the Fifteenth Amendment has often been a record of belated judicial condemnation of various state efforts to disenfranchise African Americans, either overtly through statutory enactment or covertly through inequitable administration of electoral laws and toleration of discriminatory practices.¹ One of the first devices declared unconstitutional by the Court was the “grandfather clause.”² Beginning in 1895, several states enacted laws in which persons who had been voters or descendants of voters before the ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments could be registered without meeting any literacy requirement. Black voters were therefore unable to avail themselves of the grandfather clause, and then kept from voting on grounds of illiteracy or through discriminatory administration of literacy tests. Meanwhile, illiterate White citizens could register without taking any literacy tests. With the achievement of the intended result, most states permitted these laws to lapse, but the State of Oklahoma’s grandfather clause had been enacted as a permanent amendment to the state constitution.³ A unanimous Court in the 1915 case Guinn v. United States condemned the device as recreating and perpetuating “the very conditions which the [Fifteenth] Amendment was intended to destroy.”⁴

The Court voided a subsequent Oklahoma statute providing that persons who were qualified to vote in 1916, but who failed to register between April 30 and May 11, 1916, should be perpetually disenfranchised.⁵ The effect of this statute was that Black voters only had a twenty-day registration opportunity to avoid permanent disenfranchisement by virtue of the invalidated grandfather clause in Guinn. In striking down the law, Justice Felix Frankfurter declared for the Court that the Fifteenth Amendment nullified “sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination. It hits onerous procedural requirements which effectively handicap exercise of the franchise by the colored race although the abstract right to vote may remain unrestricted as to race.”⁶

Amdt15.S1.3 Exclusion from Primaries and Literacy Tests

During the same period, the Court faced the exclusion of African Americans from participation in primary elections. While the Court did rule in 1927 that a State of Texas law violated the Equal Protection Clause by prohibiting Black voters from participating in a party primary, it did not hold at first that primary contests were elections to which federal constitutional guarantees applied.¹ Instead, the Court found that when an exclusion was perpetuated by political parties not acting in obedience to any statutory command, the discrimination did not constitute state action and was therefore not prohibited.² This holding was reversed nine years later in Smith v. Allwright when the Court declared that, where the selection of candidates for public office is entrusted by statute to political parties, a political party is acting as a state entity and must abide by the Fifteenth Amendment.³ A severely divided Court was later faced with the exclusion of African Americans by a private organization that, independently of state law or the use of state election funds, monopolized access to Democratic nominations for local office. The exclusionary policy was struck down as unconstitutional but there was no opinion of the Court.⁴

In 1898, the Court held that literacy tests that apply to all voters equally are fair on their face, and in the absence of proof of discriminatory enforcement could not be said to deny equal protection.⁵ The Court did, however, affirm striking down a literacy test in the State of Alabama’s constitutional amendment, the legislative history of which disclosed that its intent was to disenfranchise Black voters in violation of the Fifteenth Amendment.⁶ After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,⁷ when Congress amended the Act to suspend literacy tests throughout the Nation, the Court unanimously sustained the action as a valid measure to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment.⁸

Amdt15.S1.4 Racial Gerrymandering and Right to Vote Clause

The Court has held that racially-based redistricting in order to dilute minority voting power is unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment.¹ In Gomillion v. Lightfoot, the Court found a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment in the redrawing of a 1957 municipal boundary line in Tuskegee, Alabama, from a square into a twenty-eight-sided figure that excluded from municipal elections all but a few of its 400 Black voters but no White voters.²

In the 1980 case City of Mobile v. Bolden, in a considerably divided decision with respect to the requirement of discriminatory intent,³ a plurality of the Court sought to restrict the Fifteenth Amendment to cases in which there is direct denial or abridgment of the right to register and vote, and to exclude dilution claims, such as the challenge to an at-large electoral system at issue.⁴ Three Justices in separate opinions disagreed with the plurality’s basis for putting aside the Fifteenth Amendment and suggested they would have applied the Amendment to the vote dilution claim.⁵

Subsequent decisions have largely adopted the view of Justice Charles Whitaker’s concurrence⁶ in Gomillion to resolve allegations of racial gerrymandering under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.⁷ Despite the Court’s acknowledgments that racial gerrymandering may violate the purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment continues to be the predominant constitutional authority in such cases.⁸