"The Fifteenth Amendment stated that people could not be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” This construction allowed states to continue to decide the qualifications of voters as long as those qualifications were ostensibly race-neutral. Thus, while states could not deny African American men the right to vote on the basis of race, they could deny it to women on the basis of sex or to people who could not prove they were literate." Before the 15th amendment women and colored men and women were not allowed to vote but the 15th amendment allowed these privileges and prevented discrimination amongst the rights of someone based on their race and gender and states cannot deny these rights to the people because it is a constitutional law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargent_Claude_Johnson

I dont believe some of this, blacks never had a voice during . That time if they were to speak up during that time they would often get punished. Blacks had no say in there freedom, slavery wasn't abolished to help slaves, Abraham Lincoln didn't do it out of the kindness out of his heart.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

This may be a front group. Investigate, find additional sources, and leave research notes in the comments.

Photo of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, and James Baldwin: three of the most prominent African American writers of the Civil Rights era. Image credit: New York Public Library Digital Collections.

I love the details, the pride, the power of this description!

This is such a powerful articulation--borrowed from Baldwin as the epigraph makes clear--of the social construct of whiteness.

A riff on the title of TNC's forthcoming book, itself a a riff on WEB Du Bois's famous description of black experience in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). As he opens that book in a chapter entitled "Of Our Spiritual Strivings":

BETWEEN me and the other world there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter round it.

This reminds me of the incident during the Baltimore Uprising in April where Toya Graham beats her son. Stacey Patton wrote about this:

The kind of violent discipline Graham unleashed on her son did not originate with her, or with my adoptive mother who publicly beat me when I was a child, or with the legions of black parents who equate pain with protection and love. The beatings originated with white supremacy, a history of cultural and physical violence that devalues black life at every turn. From slavery through Jim Crow, from the school-to-prison pipeline, the innocence and protection of black children has always been a dream deferred. http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/29/why-is-america-celebrating-the-beating-of-a-black-child/

Hard not to relate this piece to another great statement of African American experience: Frederick Douglass's 1841 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”

A line from Elvie Thomas's "Motherless Child Blues":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmj23UrVF80

The trope of the motherless child is a popular one in African American art. Of course the destruction of families was a major consequence of the slave trade and the institution of slavery.