The 100 Year Gap Between the Civil War and Civil Rights - an Argument About How Culture, Entrepreneurship and Institutions Are Connected

Jeremy Bentham wrote that “natural rights” are “nonsense upon stilts.” He was not criticizing rights as aspirations but instead rights without institutions. Bentham’s core claim was brutally pragmatic: You can declare a right all you want, but unless there is organized power to define it, adjudicate it, and enforce it, it doesn’t actually exist.

In other words:
Rights are not self-executing.
Rights without enforcement are moral sentiments, not social facts.
What makes a right real is not the declaration but the machinery behind it.

The United States ended slavery in 1865, but it was not until the 1960s that it built - and enforced - the institutions required for equal citizenship. Progress stalled not for lack of moral clarity, but because power was ceded to those determined to preserve the old order. It was a century between winning the Civil War and winning the fight for civil rights.

Declaring a right is an act of imagination; enforcing it is an act of institution-building. Without the second, the first is just rhetoric. Put differently, rights are not wishes; they are policies backed by power.

Culture defines what we believe should be a right.
Institutions determine whether that belief becomes reliable reality.
Entrepreneurship is the work of building the scaffolding that makes that reality durable.

Each line answers a different question:
Culture answers: What do we owe one another, what norms should we share?
Institutions answer: Can we count on this tomorrow?
Entrepreneurship answers: Who builds the systems that make it so?

Nothing is redundant. Nothing can be skipped.

Many contemporary arguments collapse everything into culture:
“Change hearts”
“Win the narrative”
“Shift norms”

Others collapse everything into policy:
“Pass a law”
“Enforce a rule”
“Fix the system”

But both are incomplete alone.

Culture without institutions is aspiration.
Institutions without culture are brittle and might be ignored.
Entrepreneurship is the missing middle that translates between them.

Rights begin as cultural commitments—and only endure when someone builds the institutions to carry them forward.