Photo taken over 60 years ago and we’re still dealing with the same struggles.

“The system was never broken. It was built this way.” The words on this sign are powerful because they challenge us to look beyond individual acts of racism and examine the laws, institutions and policies that shaped inequality over generations. In American history, many of the barriers faced by Black people were not simply the result of a system malfunctioning. Slavery was protected by law. After emancipation, Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation across much of the South, while poll taxes, literacy tests and other restrictions were used to keep Black citizens from exercising political power. Discrimination could be found in schools, workplaces, transportation, housing and access to public services. Housing provides one of the clearest examples of how government policy could shape opportunity for decades. During the twentieth century, discriminatory lending practices and redlining made it harder for many Black families to obtain mortgages or purchase homes in neighborhoods where property values would later rise significantly. Racially restrictive covenants also prevented Black Americans from buying or occupying property in many communities. At the same time, segregation and unequal public investment affected the quality of schools, transportation, employment opportunities and neighborhood infrastructure available to Black families. These policies did more than determine where people lived. Because homeownership became one of the major ways American families accumulated and passed wealth from one generation to another, exclusion from that system could have consequences lasting long after the original policies disappeared. The Civil Rights Movement dismantled many of these legal barriers through decades of organizing, protest, litigation and political pressure. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in major areas of public life, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked discriminatory voting practices, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited many forms of housing discrimination. Those victories transformed the country, but changing the law did not automatically erase the economic and social consequences of everything that came before it. Families who had been denied opportunities for generations did not suddenly inherit the wealth, property or institutional advantages they had previously been prevented from accumulating.