For too long, our national conversation about civil rights has focused narrowly on voting rights or criminal justice reform. These are vital, but, as the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina reminds us, so too is the infrastructure that sustains daily life. Freedom means more than the right to cast a ballot or the right to equal justice under the law; it means the ability to live in a safe home, to travel to work or school, to drink clean water, to thrive in healthy neighborhoods, and to live with dignity. When these infrastructures are denied or degraded for Black communities, it is not just bad policy — it is a violation of civil rights.
Twenty years ago, the world watched in horror as Katrina battered the Gulf Coast. The storm left physical devastation in its wake, but what it revealed was even more devastating: the extent to which Black lives and Black communities had been systematically devalued by decades of government neglect. Katrina was not simply a natural disaster; it was a civil rights failure, an infrastructure failure, and a moral failure.
We remember the haunting images: families stranded on rooftops, bodies floating in the floodwaters, tens of thousands of mostly Black residents crowded into the Superdome without food, water, or medical care. Those images made visible what Black residents of New Orleans had long known — that when public systems fail, it is Black communities that are left unprotected, exposed, and forgotten.
Much of Katrina’s devastation was the result of decades of underinvestment in infrastructure. It is no accident that Black residents of New Orleans were concentrated in the most vulnerable, low-lying neighborhoods. As the city expanded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, land drained from swamps farther from the natural levees and high ground of the French Quarter was opened for development. Racist housing policies — urban renewal, restrictive covenants, redlining, and exclusionary lending — then steered Black families into these flood-prone areas. By the time Katrina struck, geography and discrimination had combined to place Black communities directly in harm’s way.
The poorly maintained levees that were supposed to protect neighborhoods like the Lower 9th Ward crumbled. Public housing had been neglected and weakened long before the storm. And perhaps most tellingly, the evacuation plan assumed that every resident could leave by car — an assumption that ignored the reality of a city where one third of households, disproportionately Black and poor, lacked access to a vehicle.
When the storm hit, transportation inequity became a matter of life and death. Those without cars had no way to escape the rising waters. Public transit — chronically underfunded, unreliable, and unprepared — offered no meaningful alternative. Katrina exposed what happens when mobility is treated as a privilege rather than a right: those who had been denied investment in safe, affordable, and reliable transportation died as a result.
Katrina’s aftermath showed us how underinvestment multiplies harm. Black neighborhoods were slower to receive aid, slower to be rebuilt, and quicker to be displaced by redevelopment schemes. Many residents never returned, scattered across the country by policies that made it easier to demolish public housing than to restore it. The disaster was not just the storm surge — it was the long shadow of decisions to disinvest in Black communities’ infrastructure, housing, schools, and public health.
The truth is that Katrina was not an aberration. It was the most visible and catastrophic expression of a pattern we continue to see across the country. In Flint, Michigan, and Jackson, Mississippi, residents — again, mostly Black — have been forced to drink contaminated water because of neglected water systems. In rural communities, lack of broadband access has cut children off from education and families off from economic opportunity. In cities, failing public transit continues to isolate Black neighborhoods from jobs and essential services. And as climate change intensifies storms, floods, and heat waves, Black communities are, once again, consistently left exposed, unprotected, and forgotten.
Katrina underscored that infrastructure is never neutral. Decisions about where to build homes, levees, highways, or schools, about which neighborhoods get flood protection or transit lines, are decisions about whose lives are valued. When government consistently underinvests in infrastructure in Black communities, it reinforces patterns of exclusion and inequality that are as destructive as any explicit act of racial animus.
Two decades after Katrina, the question is whether we have learned its lessons. We must treat infrastructure as a civil rights imperative and commit to building systems that are not only resilient to climate change but also equitable in design and delivery. That means ensuring Black communities are not the last to receive disaster aid and the first to be displaced when recovery dollars flow. It means investing in public transit that connects residents to opportunity. It means modernizing water systems, expanding broadband, and funding schools in ways that do not perpetuate segregation and neglect. And it means recognizing that infrastructure is not just about concrete and steel — it is about dignity, security, and belonging.
On the 20th anniversary of Katrina, we owe more than remembrance. We owe action. We cannot bring back those who were lost, but we can honor their memory by refusing to accept the inequalities that made their loss inevitable. We can reject the idea that disaster is natural when its consequences are so clearly man-made. And we can demand that our infrastructure reflects the values of justice, equality, and shared prosperity.
Katrina was a warning. The question is not whether another Katrina will come but when — and whether we will have built systems strong enough, and just enough, to protect all of us when it does.
If we are serious about racial justice, we must be serious about infrastructure. Because until we invest in the health, connectivity, and prosperity of Black communities, we will remain a nation that treats Black lives as disposable.
Deborah N. Archer is president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor of law at New York University. She is the author of Dividing Lines: How Transportation Infrastructure Reinforces Racial Inequality.
