Free Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby

it was not without its own intrinsic value. Where desegregation was a matter of right and wrong, integration was a question of cost and benefit, measuring gains against losses. Forty years ago, the debate over Parker High yielded no easy answers, and it’s only grown more complicated since.

    Given black America’s attachment to its own institutions, the campaign for civil rights did not begin as a demand for “integration” per se. It began as an effort to secure equal protection under the law. It was about the right to sit at the lunch counter and be served, not about the right to sit at the lunch counter and have a root beer with Susie and Biff.
    The word “integration” itself wasn’t even used in conjunction with the movement before 1940, when the NAACP called for “the integration of the armed forces,” a demand that President Truman satisfied eight years later by executive order. Bolstered by that success and by the legal victory of
Brown v. Board
in 1954, the NAACP moved to the public fore of the movement. Under the intellectual leadership of Thurgood Marshall, the legal architect of
Brown
’s assault on segregated schools, the organization adopted a stridently prointegrationist posture. Given the disparities of wealth and power in the United States, separate could never be equal, or even remotely sufficient to meet black individuals’ needs. The black community’s attachment to its own institutions was foolish sentimentalism, integrationists felt; it was clinging to the past for fear of an unknown future. For the good of the race, NAACP leaders said, it was time to let go of the “little kingdoms” that had sustained them in exile. If Parker was a casualty of progress, so be it.
    But the NAACP did not speak for all of black America. Not remotely. The organization’s critics accused it of elitist, myopic thinking. Only the very smallest percentage of the black professional class was even in a position to integrate with white cultural and social institutions. (The National Association for the Advancement of
Certain
People, some called it.)What about the laboring black masses and the poor, those who depended on the social cohesion and support provided by black institutions? How would dismantling Parker help them, particularly in the near term?
    A second critique of the integrationist platform emerged as the
Brown v. Board
decision moved from idea to execution. Brown held that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This sounded noble, but what did it mean? Did blacks have to integrate if they didn’t want to? What about the very best of the black schools that were as good or better than some white schools? What did
Brown
mean for schools that were by-products of residential segregation? Nobody actually knew.
Brown
established a rather simplistic moral and legal standard that said, “Segregation bad, integration good”—a standard that would prove inadequate to address the true complexity of the problem.
    Jim Crow had sunk deep in the physical and psychological bedrock of the country. An intricate, interlocking web of social networks and cultural norms had been built on top of it. Closing Parker High would destroy a century’s worth of community ties and traditions. Meanwhile, the society that integrationists expected to enter, the one in Vestavia Hills, was built to function quite well without them. Black nationalists insisted that white America was eternally racist, would never offer blacks the benefits of a healthy, mutually cooperative society—the very one they risked destroying at Parker. Integration was a fool’s bargain. It was lose-lose.
    Black teachers, in particular, feared what integrated schools would do to their jobs. In 1953, on the eve of
Brown v. Board
, a survey of black teachers in South Carolina found that three-quarters wanted to continue working under a segregated system. Two years later in Montgomery, Alabama, black support for Martin Luther King’s