Amendment XV
Section 1. 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.
Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Ratified by 3/4ths of U.S. legislatures as a Constitutional Amendment, February 1870.
Historians will conserve a Constitutional heritage. What they conserve -- what future writings in U.S. Constitutional history will include and exclude, what will be regarded as salient, what will be recognized as peripheral -- is for them to decide ... The task is to interpret the Constitutional history of a society that has been and remains structured by divisions of wealth, gender, and race, yet, at the same time, has been and remains committed to values of democracy, fairness and respect. -- Hartog, Hendrik. "The Constitution of Aspiration and the Rights that Belong to Us All," The Journal of American History, 74 (December 1987): 1013-1034.
Abstract:
This study examines interpretations of the passage of the 15th Amendment from a sample of the Southern press between 1869 and 1870. In the effort to determine the role of the Southern press in portraying federal actions during Reconstruction, it uses articles and editorials from The Atlanta Constitution, The Charleston Daily Courier, and The Richmond Dispatch, as a window illuminating the region targeted by the new civil rights laws.
Criticisms of federal measures provide an example of some of the dialectical underpinnings of U.S. rights consciousness. The study also looks at the economic underpinnings of a new, nationalized press as a way of understanding how the more universalistic understandings of civil rights would emerge over the next century.
The commercial press, which emerged with the telegraphic transmission of stories throughout the nation, offered the means for the Southern press to reach more readers. At the same time, increased readerships reinforced the larger movement toward nationalism. While many of the Southern arguments were initially against the 15th Amendment, they emerged as fundamental in the United States' ongoing, dialectical understanding of civil rights, as well as establishing the role of the press as a mediator in national affairs.
The study focuses on the role of editors in setting agendas for both political and economic ends. More often than not, the editors in this study found that they could maintain their audience by appealing to sentiments that survived through the Civil War. The rights of individual states and the on-going belief in the racial order of the South provided the message which brought the Southern press into a new, national market.
Dr. Kittrell Rushing or Dr. David Sachsman 311 Frist Hall Communication Department The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Chattanooga, Tennessee 37403-2598 http://www.utc.edu/commdept/conference/
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