The Fifteenth Amendment was sanctioned on 3^rd February of 1870. The fifteenth amendment to the United States Constitution gives the right to vote to all citizens regardless of their caste, race, religion, and creed.  The amendment was the third and last of the Reconstruction Amendment also known as the Civil War Amendments. The Reconstruction Amendment includes the 13^th Amendment, the 14^th Amendment, and the last 15^th Amendment to the US constitution sanctioned between 1865 and 1870. The fifteenth amendment is divided into two sections as mentioned below.  

Section 1 states 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.”

Section 2 states that – “The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

In retrospect, the 15th amendment was simply the beginning of a long struggle for equality that would last more than a century before African Americans were able to fully engage in American public and civic life. Through the 1880s, African Americans were able to vote and hold office in several Southern states, but in the early 1890s, actions were taken to preserve “white supremacy.” The constitutions of former Confederate states included literacy tests for voting, “grandfather clauses” excluding individuals whose ancestors had not voted in the 1860s, and other methods to disenfranchise African Americans.

The loss of political power in black America was exacerbated by social and economic segregation. Plessy v. Ferguson, a Supreme Court decision from 1896, allowed “separate but equal” facilities for the races. The “Jim Crow” segregation regime degraded the vast majority of African American citizens to second-class citizenship for more than 50 years. The African Americans used organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the National Urban League, as well as individual reformers like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, and A. Philip Randolph, to secure their rights and improve their position during this time.

In 1965, the most frontal attack on the issue of African American disenfranchisement occurred. On March 15, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, a southerner, urged Congress to approve legislation “that will make it impossible to resist the 15th amendment,” in response to allegations of continued discriminatory voting practices in numerous Southern states. “We cannot have governance for all the people until we first make certain it is the government of and by all the people,” he told Congress. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was expanded in 1970, 1975, and 1982, eliminated all remaining barriers to voting and enabled Federal oversight of voter registration in certain circumstances.

In South Carolina v. Katzenbach, the Supreme Court maintained the legality of Sections 4 and 5. (1966). The Supreme Court ruled in Shelby County v. Holder (2013) that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which established the coverage formula for determining which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance, was no longer constitutional and exceeded Congress’ enforcement authority under Section 2 of the Fifteenth Amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment was found unconstitutional by the Court “It directs that the right to vote not to be denied or restricted based on race or color, and it empowers Congress to enforce that directive. The objective of the Amendment is to create a better future, not to punish for the past.” “Regardless of how one looks at the record,” the Court writes, “no one can fairly say that it shows anything approaching the ‘pervasive, “flagrant,’ widespread, and rampant discrimination that Congress faced in 1965, and that clearly distinguished the covered jurisdictions from the rest of the country.” “Tossing out preclearance when it has worked and continues to operate to stop discriminatory modifications is like throwing away your umbrella in a thunderstorm because you are not getting wet,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, even though the preclearance clause was not struck down, it will remain ineffective unless Congress establishes a new coverage methodology.

Reference –

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_Amendments

https://law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution