March 30 marks the 150th anniversary of the 15th Amendment’s addition to the U.S. Constitution. It’s the amendment that guaranteed the right of African American men to vote, declaring, “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

In 1870, the amendment’s year of ratification, only eight Northern states permitted suffrage to African Americans. Pennsylvania had rescinded that right in 1838, with the general assembly stating that if African Americans were allowed to vote, “it would prove harmful to the state.”

Ironically, the first of 4 million African American men eligible to cast a vote under the new amendment did so in New Jersey, a state whose legislature had emphatically rejected ratification two weeks before Thomas Mundy Peterson voted in a local election in his home town of Perth Amboy on March 31, the day after the federal law took effect.

It was a serendipitous moment in U.S. history. Peterson was walking to his custodial job at an elementary school when a neighbor showed him a newspaper reporting the 15th Amendment news and encouraged him to vote on a civic charter referendum being held that day. Peterson cast his ballot (choosing for charter revision), and was later selected to be on the committee chosen to formulate the new charter.

The ease with which Peterson exercised his right to vote belied the almost immediate attempts by anti-democratic forces throughout the U.S. to evade the 15th Amendment mandate. On the day Peterson died in 1904 at age 80, during the peak of Jim Crow resegregation laws, a bill was proposed in the Maryland State Senate that was openly crafted to prevent African American voting in the state.

Today in Allegheny County, expanding and protecting voting rights is the mission of several organizations, from the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh and Voice Your Vote! Project to local chapters of Fair Districts PA, American Constitution Society and American Civil Liberties Union.

Pittsburgh’s Black Political Empowerment Project is engaged in continually battling what executive director Tim Stevens cites as “intrusion into the 15th Amendment and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, from the purging of voter lists, to racial and political gerrymandering and to voter intimidation at the polls. All persons, regardless of party, should have an ongoing, steadfast commitment to seeking new and creative ways to encourage voting for all citizens of the United States of America.”

Several Pittsburghers are looking to more prominently spotlight the 15th Amendment by recognizing the president who steadfastedly guided the amendment’s passage through a contentious congressional debate.

A 2015 Pittsburgh City Council resolution declared that Grant Street was to be rededicated “to the memory of General and President Ulysses S. Grant, his efforts toward the preservation of the Union, the abolition of slavery and the restoration of African-American suffrage in Pennsylvania.”

A rededication would please local history scholars, who have long bemoaned the fact that Grant Street currently represents the legacy of 18th-century British Major James Grant, responsible for one of biggest military failures of the French & Indian War and a bitter opponent a decade later of American Independence.

Charles McCollester, longtime professor of history at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and former president of the Battle of Homestead Foundation, envisions a standard bronze marker on the façade of the Allegheny County Courthouse (next to the marker for the ignominious Major Grant) that publicizes the council resolution declaring the street’s redesignation to President Grant.

“We have an opportunity as citizens of Pittsburgh to make a visible, enduring statement about the importance of voting rights and equal protection under the law,” he says. “Our constitutional rights are little more than words on paper unless people are reminded of how they came to be.”

In Perth Amboy, N.J., the memory of Thomas Mundy Peterson is preserved not only by a plaque but in a 1998 joint resolution of the New Jersey Legislature, naming March 31 as Thomas Mundy Peterson Day in New Jersey.

And the school where Peterson worked as a custodian … it was renamed the Thomas M. Peterson School, ensuring students will assimilate lessons of the past as they as prepare for their role as future citizens.

Lawrence E. McCullough, Ph.D., a Mt. Washington resident, is a former press director at Hall Institute of Public Policy in Trenton, N.J., and author of “The American Voter 2012: Spotlight on How We Vote and Why.”

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