Annotation

By the end of the Civil War many Northerners believed that changes for African Americans should go beyond simply ending slavery. The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reflects that desire—it makes it illegal to deny people the right to vote on account of race. It is a remarkable change—just a decade earlier, the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case had ruled that the "the Negro had no rights a white man was bound to respect." Now the constitution outlawed racial discrimination in matters relating to a citizen's rights. Although, this amendment would be blatantly ignored over the next century, as Southern states systematically denied black people the right to vote. Nonetheless, it formed the basis for the Nineteenth Amendment, which eliminated sex restrictions on voting. African Americans would not see the promise of the Fifteenth amendment fulfilled until the long struggles of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s produced new voting rights legislation.