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Page Number: 48

4 

BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 

KAGAN, J., dissenting 

1855, on the precipice of the Civil War, only five States per-
mitted  African  Americans  to  vote.   Id., at  55.  And  at  the 
federal  level,  our  Court’s  most  deplorable  holding  made 
sure that no black people could enter the voting booth.  See 
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857). 
  But the “American ideal of political equality . . . could not 
forever tolerate the limitation of the right to vote” to whites 
only.  Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 103–104 (1980) (Mar-
shall, J., dissenting).  And a civil war, dedicated to ensuring 
“government  of  the  people,  by  the  people,  for  the  people,” 
brought constitutional change.  In 1870, after a hard-fought 
battle  over  ratification,  the  Fifteenth  Amendment  carried 
the Nation closer to its founding aspirations.  “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.”  Those words 
promised to enfranchise millions of black citizens who only 
a decade earlier had been slaves.  Frederick Douglass held 
that  the  Amendment  “means  that  we  are  placed  upon  an 
equal footing with all other men”—that with the vote, “lib-
erty is to be the right of all.”  4 The Frederick Douglass Pa-
pers 270–271 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991).  
President  Grant  had  seen  much  blood  spilled  in  the  Civil 
War; now he spoke of the fruits of that sacrifice.  In a self-
described “unusual” message to Congress, he heralded the 
Fifteenth Amendment as “a measure of grander importance 
than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of 
our free Government”—as “the most important event that 
has  occurred  since  the  nation  came  into  life.”    Ulysses  S. 
Grant, Message to the Senate and House of Representatives 
(Mar. 30, 1870), in 7 Compilation of the Messages and Pa-
pers of the Presidents 1789–1897, pp. 55–56 (J. Richardson 
ed. 1898). 
  Momentous  as  the  Fifteenth  Amendment  was,  celebra-
tion  of  its  achievements  soon  proved  premature.    The 
Amendment’s  guarantees  “quickly  became  dead  letters  in