In 1852, Frederick Douglass gave a speech that asked a question that reflected the discomfort between our country’s stated vision of freedom and independence and the reality of on-going human bondage:
“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”
While we no longer live in a nation of enslavement, legally segregated schools, neighborhoods, lunch counters, and voting booths, Douglass’s question still forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: A nation cannot fully celebrate its ideals without also examining how well it has lived up to them.
As America approaches its 250th anniversary, we need to revisit Douglass’s provocation and understand the progress made and what we must still achieve.
The victories for our American ideals since the 1950s were neither inevitable nor automatic. They were won through generations of courage, sacrifice, organizing, persistence, faith, and loss of life.
The America of today reflects extraordinary progress. Millions of people whose opportunities were once restricted by law now lead businesses, institutions, cities, and movements. Generations have expanded access to education, homeownership, entrepreneurship, and political participation. As detailed in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s irrebuttable scholarship, The 1619 Project, the circle of opportunity that now benefits all Americans widened because people fought to make the nation’s promise more attainable.
Anniversaries are both opportunities to celebrate and to reflect. To many, America’s change and tilt towards equality and inclusion seemed inevitable and ongoing. Recently, we have been forcefully reminded that “the pursuit of happiness” is not the same as “shared prosperity.” And that “equality” is not a fixed definition but a sustained striving against our tendency to other, limit, and exclude.
In 2026, Douglass’s poignant question compels us to ask: Who has access to opportunity? Who can build wealth? Who can own? Who can invest?
And, who among of us will choose to shape a nation’s future that includes individuals, families, and communities who today we other?
Effects of History Remain
The effects of redlining did not disappear when the maps disappeared. Urban renewal reshaped communities in ways that remain visible today. Decades of disinvestment left gaps that cannot be closed overnight.
Recently, during a visit to Tulsa, I was reminded of how tangible those traces can be. We spent time learning about the history of Greenwood, once one of the largest Black Wall Streets, and the generations of resilience that followed a state sanctioned massacre and burning of a thriving Black community.
Even after the neighborhood was rebuilt, a massive highway development split the community apart once again.
The road still carries thousands of cars each day. The effects remain visible in the physical landscape and in the patterns of investment and opportunity that followed. That physical destruction made it harder for residents to start a business, gain the wealth to buy a home and pass assets and opportunity from one generation to the next.
For decades, Living Cities has worked alongside local leaders, financial institutions, philanthropic partners, and communities to expand opportunities and to make the pursuit of happiness more accessible. We learned that talent is widely distributed, but access to capital is not. Return potential exists everywhere, but investment seldom follows. We conflate investment risk with our reflex to other and create barriers to essential social, knowledge and financial capital.
As a result, many communities remain disconnected from the resources needed to seed lasting prosperity. Capital determines which ideas grow, and build generational wealth, and thrive.
Frederick Douglass asked America to confront who was excluded from the freedom to thrive. Two hundred and fifty years later, we know that exclusion comes in many forms and that economic exclusion and extraction results in generational harm.
The next chapter of American prosperity depends on whether we choose to exercise our agency to build, own, invest, and shape future communities. Current and rising leaders within financial institutions, philanthropy, government, and civic organizations now must seize the generational opportunity to model and build the economy our nation needs. One in which freedom and opportunity are bolstered by economic viability and individual agency.
Our Next 250 Years
At Living Cities, Douglass’s question feels especially relevant as we mark our own 35th anniversary.
Our founders understood that many of the most important challenges facing communities could not be solved by any single state acting alone. They believed progress required collaboration across sectors, across forms of capital, and across communities themselves.
Thirty-five years later, we strive to demonstrate, influence, and inform how our national approach to economic growth and shared prosperity can include all people within the United States. We believe that our strategic focus on social, knowledge, and financial capital will lead to increased home and enterprise ownership, economic mobility, and individual and family agency. Our three decades focused on disinvested communities within American cities continues to hold promise that economic opportunity will one day no longer be determined by geography, race, or exclusive advantage.
Douglass challenged America to examine the distance between its ideals and its reality. Two hundred and fifty years after our founding, that challenge remains.
Among the foundations, financial institutions, and staff who comprise Living Cities, we resolve to narrow that distance by investing in cities, communities, and families. This will help ensure that America’s economic foundation includes all of its people and our Constitutional freedoms will continue beyond the next 250 years.