DOUGLAS GINSBURG, Federal Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit:
All men first got the right to vote after the Civil War, with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. The amendment states: “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.”

The amendment was adopted during Reconstruction – the postwar years when the southern states had rejoined the Union. Some four million ex-slaves were now citizens – with the right to vote. The Fifteen Amendment guaranteed that right – at least on paper.
By the 1880s, Reconstruction had ended. Federal troops had left the South. And White southerners again controlled their legislatures, and passed laws to disenfranchise Blacks.
Literacy tests disqualified roughly half of all Blacks – those who could not read. Between 1889 and 1910, eleven southern states adopted another backdoor form of disenfranchisement – the poll tax.
A Virginia citizen voting for the first time had to pay three years’ worth of poll taxes – roughly $130 in todays money. An impossible sum for a low-paid field hand – Black or White. By 1900, just one percent of Black citizens in Louisiana were eligible to vote.
In a 1903 case, the Supreme Court said it lacked the power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. The Voting Rights Act – passed in 1965 – outlawed such discrimination against Black voters. The result: A higher percentage of Blacks than Whites voted in the 2012 election.
As you can see, there can be a big difference between the law on the books and the law on the ground.

It took almost a century to make good on the promise of the Fifteenth Amendment – adopted in 1870 during Reconstruction after the Civil War – to give all men the right to vote.

As for women? Well, that’s another story.