Yes, it is.
Under our legal structure the right to vote has never been recognized for all people. The right has certainly always existed from the founding and was being exercised by those who were recognized as having the franchise.
Where could blacks and women vote?
What the 15th Amendment did was invalidate any laws that conditioned the (already exiting) right to vote on a citizen's race, color or previous condition of servitude.
The struggle over voting rights in the United States dates all the way back to the founding of the nation. The original U.S. Constitution did not define voting rights for citizens, and until 1870, only white men were allowed to vote. Two constitutional amendments changed that. The Fifteenth Amendment (ratified in 1870) extended voting rights to men of all races.
Hoping that the
U.S. Supreme Court would rule that
women had a constitutional right to vote, suffragists made several attempts to vote in the early 1870s and then filed
lawsuits when they were turned away. Anthony actually succeeded in voting in 1872 but was arrested for that act and found guilty in a widely publicized trial that gave the movement fresh momentum. After the
Supreme Court ruled against them in the 1875 case
Minor v. Happersett, suffragists began the decades-long campaign for an amendment to the
U.S. Constitution that would
enfranchise women.
Well before the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, women could vote in state and local elections in some US states and territories, especially in the West. After it became law, many women across the US were still excluded from voting because they were not citizens or because of state restrictions on certain populations voting.
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–
Same goes for the 19th Amendment; again that Amendment just invalidated any laws that conditioned the (already exiting) right to vote on one's gender.
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 sex.
What in the words, terms or structure of those Amendments would lead you believe that anyone understood the right was being "granted" by those provisions?
They were rights denied before then.
Except in some isolated cases at the state level, women were not permitted to vote in the United States during the 19th century. One notable exception was the territory of Wyoming, which had long enforced women's suffrage by the time it became a state in 1890.
Most African-Americans could not vote throughout most of the 1800s. Black men were officially enfranchised in 1870 by the 14th Amendment.
In the early days of the state of New Jersey, women and black people could vote. They just had to be “free inhabitants of [the] State” who were over the age of majority, had more than fifty pounds of wealth and had lived in New Jersey for more than six months. The process of revoking these rights, which took place in the early 1800s, represented a narrowing of American potential.
New Jersey was unique in permitting women to vote. The other twelve original states all had constitutions specifically stating that voters had to be male. But in New Jersey, the framing of the state constitution, which occurred in 1776, permitted women to vote
