America’s 250th year was a horrible one for civil rights. Here’s how to get back on track.

This piece is part of “America in the balance: The fight for our history and future,” a special series from MS NOW that explores where we are as a nation as we commemorate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

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The Declaration of Independence promised liberty to people it enslaved, and at the 250th anniversary of that signing, Americans are confronted with uncomfortable questions, among them, why the civil rights framework we built to enforce our founding document’s promise of liberty continues to fall short. 

The answer is in our civil rights architecture. We built a jurisprudence that, by identifying violations and punishing wrongdoers, mostly seeks to bring a halt to discrimination after it occurs. To be sure, that architecture has produced indispensable gains, but our country declared racism illegal while leaving in place the infrastructure that produces racial inequality: the land use decisions that segregate neighborhoods, the transportation systems that isolate communities from opportunity, the housing and lending policies that concentrate wealth and poverty, the schools that reflect those patterns of exclusion and the public institutions that distribute resources unevenly across race and place.

As long as those systems continue to shape where people live, learn, work, travel and access opportunity, discrimination will continue to be reproduced, even when individual acts of bias are prohibited.

The evidence is clear that by itself, prohibiting discrimination cannot fulfill our founding promises. Racial inequality, which persists in 2026, was built from the ground up, so the system of racial justice to combat it must be built from the ground up, too. This 250th year of our country taught us this lesson well; the Supreme Court further gutted the Voting Rights Act, one of the few civil rights laws drafted to help prevent discrimination from happening.

More than a decade ago, the court struck down the section of the Voting Rights Act that required states and localities with a documented history of discriminatory voting practices to obtain federal “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. In April’s regrettable Louisiana v. Callais ruling, it gutted the section drafted to ensure fair representation for Black and other marginalized voters. The formal right to vote still exists, yes. But when the infrastructure of democratic participation is torn down — when polling places close, voter rolls are purged and districts are redrawn to dilute marginalized voters’ political power — the formal right is hollow. A right to vote has little meaning without an infrastructure around it that makes it real.

The rush by multiple Southern states to dilute the voting strength of marginalized voters after the Callais ruling was a demonstration that the Voting Rights Act, as it was written, is still needed.

The Supreme Court’s body blow to the Voting Rights Act not only represents the erosion of voting protections but the abandonment of a model of racial justice that pairs the prohibition of discrimination with the prevention of it, a model that is necessary if we are to come closer to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.