The 15th Amendment to the Constitution

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The Fifteenth Amendment: A Solution or a Stepping Stone? Written by: Anna Carlson 12 February 2012 The Fifteenth Amendment attempted to give all black U.S. Citizens the right to vote, but the outraged indignation of many white citizens prevented this reality from occurring. In the time between the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and the proposal of the Twenty Fourth Amendment, almost a centuries worth of time, white supremacists used a variety of tactics to prevent the Blacks from voting, including literacy tests, poll taxes, and physical intimidation. With the ratification of the Twenty Fourth amendment, many of these dealings became illegal, and voter discrimination was thought to be eliminated, but was it truly gone? There are modern day tactics, such as the requirement of a valid I.D. (which can be considered as a variation of the poll tax), redrawn voting district lines in favor of certain races and or political parties, and spontaneously changed poll dates that make it difficult to vote. There are also significant factors that indicate that the Fifteenth Amendment, in conjunction with the Twenty Fourth amendment, failed to truly eliminate all possible legal loop holes that would allow for the continuation of ethnological discrimination. The attitude of white supremacists towards the Blacks preceding the Fifteenth Amendment was hostile at best. Though the 14th amendment granted them U.S. citizenship and the right to vote, attempts to do so were met with verbal slander, loss of employment, and in some cases physical animosity. Faced with a choice between their lives (sometimes in the literal sense) and fulfilling their right to vote, most chose their family, jobs, and lives. The government, when presented with the reality of this physical and verbal intimidation, decided to take action

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