Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
Reconstruction

African Americans called the amendment the nation's " second birth " and a "greater revolution than that of 1776 ", according to historian Eric Foner in his book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. The first black person known to vote after the amendment's adoption was Thomas Mundy Peterson, who cast his ballot on March 31, 1870, in a Perth Amboy, New Jersey, referendum election adopting a revised city charter. African Americans—many of them newly freed slaves—put their newfound freedom to use, voting in scores of black candidates. During Reconstruction, 16 black men served in Congress and 2,000 black men served in elected local, state, and federal positions. White supremacists, such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), used paramilitary violence to prevent blacks from voting. The Enforcement Acts were passed by Congress in 1870–1871 to authorize federal prosecution of the KKK and others who violated the amendment.
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