edHelper.com
After the Civil War
(1865-1870)

The Fifteenth Amendment

The Fifteenth Amendment
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   high interest, readability grades 5 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   4.51

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    suffrage, federal, ratify, literacy, rejoin, during, tested, goal, gain, unfair, government, army, whatever, vote, allow, slave
     content words:    Fifteenth Amendment, After Reconstruction, Civil War, Thomas Mundy Peterson, During Reconstruction, When Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan

Print The Fifteenth Amendment
edHelper.com subscriber options:
     Print The Fifteenth Amendment  (font options, pick words for additional puzzles, and more)
     Quickly print reading comprehension
     Print a proofreading activity

Feedback on The Fifteenth Amendment
     Leave your feedback on The Fifteenth Amendment  (use this link if you found an error in the story)

The Fifteenth Amendment
By Cathy Pearl 		  
1     The Fifteenth Amendment was proposed during Reconstruction. The goal of the amendment was to give all black men the right to vote. The amendment was not written well. There were many ways to get around it. After Reconstruction was over, whites in the South found a way to do that.
 
2     This amendment called for suffrage. Suffrage is the right to vote. The amendment only called for black men to be allowed to vote. It did not include women. At the time, white women could not vote, either. Women would not gain the right to vote for many more years.
 
3     Reconstruction acts gave black men the right to vote in Southern states. But many saw this as unfair. Northern states were not giving black men the right to vote. In 1868, eleven states in the North did not allow blacks to vote in elections.
 
4     The answer to that problem was a new amendment to the Constitution. Three different versions were written. The one that was chosen said that states could not deny citizens the right to vote because of race, color, or having once being a slave.
 
5     Many in Congress were worried about the wording. There were ways for the South to get around this new law. Still, Congress approved it on February 2, 1869.

Paragraphs 6 to 13:
For the complete story with questions: click here for printable
Copyright © 2008 edHelper