Fifteenth Amendment bars racial voting restrictions in text

The Fifteenth Amendment is ratified on February 3, 1870. The amendment says the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged by the United States or any state because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The amendment marks a major Reconstruction victory, but states later use poll taxes, literacy tests, violence, grandfather clauses, and white primaries to evade it. The constitutional voting-rights guarantee requires later generations to repeatedly defend it against racial voter suppression.