ShmoopTube

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[ musical flourish ]

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And here's your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by enfranchisement,

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the process of turning every store into a Starbucks.

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All right, well, which group was divided over support

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for the changes highlighted in the image?

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Hmm. And here are your potential answers.

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[ mumbles ]

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All right.

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Enfranchisement, or granting a group of people the right to vote,

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might seem like a no-brainer today,

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but back when slices of the population still didn't have access

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to the ballot box, it caused a bit of a tizzy.

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Let's see which of the following groups took the road

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to Splitsville over the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment.

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All right, was the group that divided over support for the Fifteenth Amendment

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B - the Ku Klux Klan?

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Well, though they certainly would have opposed

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granting African Americans the right to vote,

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the Klan was only just

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forming as the Fifteenth Amendment passed, so it's not B.

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Did the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment cause a division in

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C - the temperance movement?

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The temperance movement involved prohibiting the sale

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of alcoholic beverages,

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which only mattered for voting in the sense that

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you shouldn't show up drunk to the polls. Really.

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That teetotals C, too.

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Could the Fifteenth Amendment have caused issues within D -

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the Democratic Party?

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Well, actually, the Democratic Party was very much unified

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in their opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment.

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That's a total drag on D, as well.

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Which means the group that divided over support

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for the Fifteenth Amendment was A -

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the women's suffrage movement.

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The women's suffrage movement, which advocated for

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a woman's right to vote, struggled over how to

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approach the Fifteenth Amendment.

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Half of the group supported it in hopes that it would be

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a stepping stone to women's suffrage,

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while the other half opposed it for not including female voting rights

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to begin with. So the answer is A.

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In fact, it took another 50 years for the

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U.S. to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment, which

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finally gave women the right to vote.

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Talk about being unfashionably late to the party.

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[ witch cackles ]

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