Formerly enslaved people had to struggle over what citizenship would entail

They had to struggle over what their new status as citizens should actually mean in terms of rights, protections, participation, and social standing.

“Lived citizenship”

Legal citizenship means:

the rights and status formally recognized by law.

Lived citizenship means:

how that citizenship is actually experienced and exercised in people's social, political, and economic lives.

For example:

Suppose the law says:

“Black citizens have equal legal rights.”

That is legal citizenship.

But if those citizens are:

prevented from participating politically;

treated as socially inferior;

excluded from institutions;

denied meaningful economic opportunities;

then their formal citizenship and their lived experience of citizenship do not fully correspond.

This is very close to the distinction you have been developing:

formal legal equality → real, but not automatically sufficient for equal social and economic standing.

And importantly, this does not mean legal equality was meaningless.

It means:

legal equality is one dimension of equality, while its social and economic realization depends on conditions beyond the declaration itself.