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Congressional Fellowship Program
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2011
For most of American history, black Americans were excluded from the political process. Even after the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, for decades, especially in the South, blacks were prevented from voting through various institutional tactics (e.g., poll taxes and literacy tests), violence, and intimidation. As a result, most political institutions through the mid-twentieth century had few or no black faces. With the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Fifteenth Amendment was codified, and blacks began to vote and participate in the political process in unprecedented ways.