Constitutional rights required active vigilance to gain real meaning.

Evidence

Delegates knew that while a guarantee of citizenship was a milestone, they would need to breathe meaning into their new status. What, they asked, did sweeping phrases such as “equal protection” and “due process” mean? While the Civil War and Reconstruction seemed to establish the unassailable belonging of Black Americans, persistent discrimination and organized violence required that they exercise renewed vigilance. In a short time, convention-goers had already become veterans of struggles over landownership, labor conditions, family autonomy, mobility, public education, and armed self-defense. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 733

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core ‘deviation vs design’ frame — a text granting citizenship did not itself confer equality; enforcement was a separate struggle.
• QUESTION: This suggests that formal rights and lived protection were distinct problems — worth tracking how the book handles the gap between legal status and practical power.