History of the United States I / Unit 16 USH1 2285 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Sumner's Refusal
The idea
The Fifteenth Amendment holds that the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It was drafted in the winter of eighteen sixty-nine and ratified in eighteen seventy. To secure the broadest support its drafters deliberately excluded any language on literacy tests and poll taxes, which the anchor calls the most common ways Black people were traditionally disenfranchised.
In practice
Charles Sumner, the Senate's most committed advocate of legal equality, refusing to cast a vote for the voting-rights amendment at all.
Where people slip
Sumner refused precisely because of those loopholes, and he was proved right within a generation. A state may still require a literacy test, a poll tax, or a property qualification, so long as it does not name race. Every one of those devices was in use across the South within thirty years.
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