Concept

Black Suffrage

The right of Black men to vote, a central and contested demand of Reconstruction-era politics before its constitutional guarantee by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870.

Before the Civil War, Black men could vote in only a handful of Northern states, usually subject to property requirements not applied to white voters. Black suffrage became a defining political battle of Reconstruction: the 1867 Reconstruction Acts required former Confederate states to enfranchise Black men as a condition of readmission to the Union, and the Fifteenth Amendment (ratified 1870) barred the federal and state governments from denying the vote on the basis of race. In practice, Black suffrage was won through sustained Black political organizing and Republican coalition-building, and it was then violently and legally suppressed across the South by the end of the nineteenth century through poll taxes, literacy tests, and outright terror.