The 15th Amendment: The Fifteenth Amendment

After the American Civil War (1861-1865), the United States entered a stage of reconstruction where many southern states passed poll taxes that appeared to be merely another source of revenue, when in actuality, its purpose was to prevent African Americans from voting (Carson & Bonk, 15). In attempts of solving this issue, the fifteenth amendment was passed, which declared the right to vote to male citizens of any color. The fifteenth amendment, however, did not stop southern state legislators to find other ways to prevent African Americans as well as other minorities from voting. In addition to making citizens have to pay in order to vote, southern states also adapted literacy tests (Carson & Bonk, 15). In order to vote, citizens had to take literacy tests and obtain the results that identified them as “literate” enough to vote. Although the literacy tests gravely affected African Americans, it also affected woman and people of other ethnicities with poor education denying them the right to vote (Carson & Bonk, 15). By oppressing minorities and denying them the right to vote, the obvious outcome was that wealthy candidates who ran for

In the time period of this amendment, there was one main contemporaneous social justice issue that was related to the abolition of poll taxes: the right to vote by every citizen of the United States. Since the early history of America, voting was restricted to wealthy white male (Sigler, 15). Being a government based on democracy, it is contradictory to only listen to the requests of a portion of the people. As the people who were restricted to vote because of their skin color became intolerant of this injustice, they began to start various movements, the Civil Rights Movement, which focused on the goal of reaching social equality, and of course, within the goal of reaching social equality was the right to