No, I am not wrong.
Blacks were supposed to have been given the right to vote by the fifteenth amendment.
The
Fifteenth Amendment (
Amendment XV) to the
United States Constitution prohibits the federal government and each state from denying a citizen the
right to vote based on that citizen's "
race,
color, or previous condition of servitude." It was ratified on February 3, 1870, as the third and last of the
Reconstruction Amendments.
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution - Wikipedia
But alas, the constitution didn't matter to whites.
Minor v. Happersett, U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court ruled unanimously in 1874 that the right of
suffrage was not protected by the
Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In its decision the Supreme Court declared that the privileges and immunities of citizenship are not defined by the U.S. Constitution; thus, individual states’ enfranchisement of male citizens only was not necessarily a violation of the citizenship rights of women. This finding effectively put an end to attempts to win voting rights for women through court decree. Subsequent efforts in the woman suffrage movement in the
United States focused on the revision of voting laws of individual states and on the ratification of a separate amendment to the Constitution.
Minor v. Happersett | law case
Now before the excuses start from the racists about how this only applied to women:
United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1876), was a voting rights case in which the
United States Supreme Court narrowly construed the
15th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which provides that suffrage for citizens can not be restricted due to race, color or the individual having previously been a slave.
This was the Supreme Court's first
voting rights case under the Fifteenth Amendment and the
Enforcement Act of 1870. A Kentucky electoral official had refused to register an African‐American's vote in a municipal election and was indicted under two sections of the 1871 act: section 1 required that administrative preliminaries to elections be conducted without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude; section 2 forbade wrongful refusal to register votes where a prerequisite step “required as foresaid” had been omitted.
The Court held that the Fifteenth Amendment did not confer the right of suffrage, but it prohibited exclusion from voting on racial grounds. The justices invalidated the operative section 3 of the Enforcement Act since it did not repeat the amendment's words about race, color, and servitude. They ruled that the section exceeded the scope of the Fifteenth Amendment. This ruling was the grounds for which the
Ku Klux Klan was invented, as it provided white southerners with legal reassurance.
United States v. Reese - Wikipedia
This was an 8-1 SCOTUS decision whereby the court decided that,"the 15th amendment did not guarantee the right to vote but it just prevented states from giving preference to one citizen over another on account of race or color." Chief Justice Morrison Waite, a
REPUBLICAN.