As the nation moves on into 2026, there will be more local, state and national commemorations to usher in America’s 250th anniversary. Along with the celebratory narrative, the nation will have an opportunity to critically address the ongoing fight for civil rights, ensuring the celebration is inclusive of the nation’s full history.
Realizing early on that the most important guarantee of equality would come through the right to vote, Black Americans sought to gain the right to vote by petitioning their state legislatures and the U.S. Congress in the early Republic, resisting the status quo and protesting for the right to vote in this country from the very beginning.
As a matter of fact, free Black men in the northern states, including New England, were allowed to vote. With the free Black population in the North being relatively small, the Black vote’s impact was minimal. And for the vast majority of Black Americans, it has been a long, hard road in achieving the right to vote, with the goal post continually being changed.
It would take a bloody, four-year Civil War and the passage of the 15th Amendment in the month of March in 1870 to finally give Black men the right to vote in this country. It was at that time, President Ulysses Grant, in commenting on the adoption of the 15th Amendment declared, it “completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life.”
Now, remember, the nation came to life in 1776, and it took 94 years since the nation came to life for Black men to get the right to vote.
To be sure, that March 1870 event was greeted with widespread celebration in the Black communities throughout the nation. My ancestors were among many who viewed this historic moment, this celebratory occasion as “the greatest day for the American Black man … that history has ever recorded,” “the crowning joy of our life.”
And, for the first time since the founding of this nation, the South will have “the look” of a democracy with Black men holding political office on the local, state, and national level. It appeared that America had become “a living example of a great and free republic,” with America finally living up to its ideal that “all men are created equal,” making our democracy more inclusive and bringing us closer to that more perfect union.
What should have been a permanent watershed, turning point moment in American history proved to be short-lived. This attempt to make America what it ought to be following the Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War made many whites in the South resentful toward efforts being made to grant civil rights to Black people. By 1877 and the end of Reconstruction, white politicians and lawmakers regained control and power in the South and set upon a campaign to disenfranchise Black voters throughout the South, opening up a shameful chapter in American history.