On May 17, 1954, a nervous 45-year-old lawyer named Thurgood Marshall took a seat in the Supreme Court’s gallery. The founder and director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund hoped to learn that he had prevailed in his pivotal case. When Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Court’s opinion in Brown v. Board of Education, Marshall could not have known that he had also won what is still widely considered the most significant legal decision in American history. Hearing Warren declare “that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” delivered Marshall into a state of euphoria. “I was so happy, I was numb,” he said. After exiting the courtroom, he joyously swung a small boy atop his shoulders and galloped around the austere marble hall. Later, he told reporters, “It is the greatest victory we ever had.”

For Marshall, the “we” who triumphed in Brown surely referred not only, or even primarily, to himself and his Legal Defense Fund colleagues, but to the entire Black race, on whose behalf they’d toiled. And Black Americans did indeed find Brown exhilarating. Harlem’s Amsterdam News, echoing Marshall, called Brown “the greatest victory for the Negro people since the Emancipation Proclamation.” W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “I have seen the impossible happen. It did happen on May 17, 1954.” When Oliver Brown learned of the outcome in the lawsuit bearing his surname, he gathered his family near, and credited divine providence: “Thanks be to God for this.” Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged Montgomery’s activists in 1955 by invoking Brown: “If we are wrong, then the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.” Many Black people viewed the opinion with such awe and reverence that for years afterward, they threw parties on May 17 to celebrate Brown’s anniversary.

Over time, however, some began questioning what exactly made Brown worthy of celebration. In 1965, Malcolm X in his autobiography voiced an early criticism of Brown: It had yielded precious little school desegregation over the previous decade. Calling the decision “one of the greatest magical feats ever performed in America,” he contended that the Court’s “masters of legal phraseology” had used “trickery and magic that told Negroes they were desegregated—Hooray! Hooray!—and at the same time … told whites ‘Here are your loopholes.’ ”

[Read: The children who desegregated America’s schools]

But that criticism paled in comparison with the anti-Brown denunciation in Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation two years later. They condemned not Brown’s implementation, but its orientation. The fundamental aim of integration must be abandoned because it was driven by the “assumption that there is nothing of value in the black community,” they maintained.

To sprinkle black children among white pupils in outlying schools is at best a stop-gap measure. The goal is not to take black children out of the black community and expose them to white middle-class values; the goal is to build and strengthen the black community.

Although Black skeptics of the integration ideal originated on the far left, Black conservatives—including the economist Thomas Sowell—have more recently ventured related critiques. The most prominent example is Marshall’s successor on the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995, four years after joining the Court, Thomas issued a blistering opinion that opened, “It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.”

Desperate efforts to promote school integration, Thomas argued, stemmed from the misperception that identifiably Black schools were somehow doomed to fail because of their racial composition. “There is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment,” he wrote. Taking a page from Black Power’s communal emphasis, Thomas argued that “black schools can function as the center and symbol of black communities, and provide examples of independent black leadership, success, and achievement.” In a 2007 opinion, he extolled Washington, D.C.’s all-Black Dunbar High School—which sent dozens of graduates to the Ivy League and its ilk during the early 20th century—as a paragon of Black excellence.

In the 2000s, as Brown crept toward its 50th anniversary, Derrick Bell of the NYU School of Law went so far as to allege that the opinion had been wrongly decided. For Bell, who had sharpened his skills as an LDF lawyer, Brown’s “integration ethic centralizes whiteness. White bodies are represented as somehow exuding an intrinsic value that percolates into the ‘hearts and minds’ of black children.” Warren’s opinion in the case should have affirmed Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” regime, Bell wrote, but it should have insisted on genuine equality of expenditures, rather than permitting the sham equality of yore that consigned Black students to shoddy classrooms in dilapidated buildings. He acknowledged, though, that his jaundiced account put him at odds with dominant American legal and cultural attitudes: “The Brown decision,” he noted, “has become so sacrosanct in law and in the beliefs of most Americans that any critic is deemed wrongheaded, even a traitor to the cause.”

In her New Book, Integrated: How American Schools Failed Black Children, Noliwe Rooks adds to a growing literature that challenges the portrayal of the decision as “a significant civil rights–era win.” Rooks, the chair of the Africana-​studies department at Brown University, offers an unusual blend of historical examination and family memoir that generally amplifies the concerns articulated by prior desegregation discontents. The result merits careful attention not for its innovative arguments, but as an impassioned, arresting example of how Brown skepticism, which initially gained traction on the fringes of Black life, has come to hold considerable appeal within the Black intellectual mainstream.

As recently as midway through the first Trump administration, Rooks would have placed herself firmly in the traditional pro-Brown camp, convinced that addressing racial inequality in education could best be pursued through integration. But traveling a few years ago to promote a book that criticized how private schools often thwart meaningful racial integration, she repeatedly encountered audience members who disparaged her core embrace of integration. Again and again, she heard from Black parents that “the trauma their children experienced in predominantly white schools and from white teachers was sometimes more harmful than the undereducation occurring in segregated schools.”

[From the May 2018 issue: The report on race that shook America]

The onslaught dislodged Rooks’s faith in the value of contemporary integration, and even of Brown itself. She now exhibits the convert’s zeal. Brown, she writes, should be viewed as “an attack on Black schools, politics, and communities, which meant it was an attack on the pillars of Black life.” For some Black citizens, the decision acted as “a wrecking ball that crashed through their communities and, like a pendulum, continues to swing.”

Rooks emphasizes the plight of Black educators, who disproportionately lost their positions in Brown’s aftermath because of school consolidations. Before Brown, she argues, “Black teachers did not see themselves as just teaching music, reading, or science, but also as activists, organizers, and freedom fighters who dreamed of and fought for an equitable world for future generations”; they served as models who showed “Black children how to fight for respect and societal change.”

Endorsing one of Black Power’s analogies, she maintains that school integration meant that “as small a number as possible of Black children were, like pepper on popcorn, lightly sprinkled atop wealthy, white school environments, while most others were left behind.” Even for those ostensibly fortunate few flecks of pepper, Rooks insists, providing the white world’s seasoning turned out to be a highly uncertain, dangerous endeavor. She uses her father’s disastrous experiences with integration to examine what she regards as the perils of the entire enterprise. After excelling in all-Black educational environments, including as an undergraduate at Howard University, Milton Rooks became one of a very small number of Black students to enroll at the Golden Gate University School of Law in the early 1960s.

Sent by his hopeful parents “over that racial wall,” Milton encountered hostility from white professors, who doubted his intellectual capacity, Rooks recounts, and “spit him back up like a piece of meat poorly digested.” She asserts that the ordeal not only prompted him to drop out of law school but also spurred his descent into alcoholism. Rooks extrapolates further, writing:

Milton’s experience reflected the trauma Black students suffered as they desegregated public schools in states above the Mason-Dixon Line, where displays of racism were often mocking, disdainful, pitying, and sword sharp in their ability to cut the unsuspecting into tiny bits. It destroyed confidence, shook will, sowed doubt, murdered souls—quietly, sure, but still as completely as could a mob of white racists setting their cowardice, rage, and anger loose upon the defenseless.

The harms that contemporary integrated educational environments inflict upon Black students can be tantamount, in her view, to the harms imposed upon the many Black students who are forced to attend monoracial, woeful urban high schools. To make this point, Rooks recounts her own struggle to correct the misplacement of her son, Jelani, in a low-level math class in Princeton, New Jersey’s public-school system during the aughts (when she taught at Princeton University). She witnessed other Black parents meet with a similar lack of support in guiding their children to the academically demanding courses that could propel them to elite colleges. In Jelani’s case, she had evidence that teachers’ “feelings were hardening against him.” He led a life of relative safety and economic privilege, and felt at ease among his white classmates and friends, she allows, even as she also stresses that what he “experienced wasn’t the violence of poverty; it was something else equally devastating”:

We knew that poor, working-class, or urban communities were not the only places where Black boys are terrorized and traumatized. We knew that the unfamiliarity of his white friends with any other Black people would one day become an issue in our home. We knew that guns were not the only way to murder a soul.

Frustrated with Princeton’s public schools, Rooks eventually enrolled Jelani in an elite private high school where, she notes, he also endured racial harassment—and from which he graduated before making his way to Amherst College.

seven decades have now elapsed since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown. Given the stubbornly persistent phenomenon of underperforming predominantly Black schools throughout the nation, arguing that Brown’s potential has been fully realized would be absurd. Regrettably, the Warren Court declined to advance the most powerful conception of Brown when it had the opportunity to do so: Its infamously vague “all deliberate speed” approach allowed state and local implementation to be delayed and opposed for far too long. In its turn, the Burger Court provided an emaciated conception of Brown’s meaning, one that permitted many non-southern jurisdictions to avoid pursuing desegregation programs. Rooks deftly sketches this lamentable, sobering history.

[From the May 2014 issue: Segregation now ...]

Disenchantment with Brown’s educational efficacy is thus entirely understandable. Yet to suggest that the Supreme Court did not go far enough, fast enough in galvanizing racially constructive change in American schools after Brown is one thing. To suggest that Brown somehow took a wrong turn is quite another.

Rooks does not deny that integration succeeded in narrowing the racial achievement gap. But like other Brown critics, she nevertheless idealizes the era of racial segregation. Near Integrated  ’s conclusion, Rooks contends that “too few of us have a memory of segregated Black schools as the beating heart of vibrant Black communities, enabling students to compose lives of harmony, melody, and rhythm and sustained Black life and dignity.” But this claim gets matters exactly backwards. The brave people who bore segregation’s brunt believed that Jim Crow represented an assault on Black life and dignity, and that Brown marked a sea change in Black self-conceptions.

Desegregation’s detractors routinely elevate the glory days of D.C.’s Dunbar High School, but they refuse to heed the lessons of its most distinguished graduates. Charles Hamilton Houston—Dunbar class of 1911, who went on to become valedictorian at Amherst and the Harvard Law Review’s first Black editor—nevertheless dedicated his life to eradicating Jim Crow as an NAACP litigator and Thurgood Marshall’s mentor in his work contesting educational segregation. Sterling A. Brown—Dunbar class of 1918, who graduated from Williams College before becoming a distinguished poet and professor—nevertheless wrote the following in 1944, one decade before Brown:

Negroes recognize that the phrase “equal but separate accommodations” is a myth. They have known Jim Crow a long time, and they know Jim Crow means scorn and not belonging.

Much as they valued having talented, caring teachers, these men understood racial segregation intimately, and they detested it.

In the 1990s, Nelson B. Rivers III, an unheralded NAACP official from South Carolina, memorably heaved buckets of cold water on those who were beginning to wonder, “ Was integration the right thing to do? Was it worth it? Was Brown a good decision?” Rivers dismissed such questions as “asinine,” and continued:

To this day, I can remember bus drivers pulling off and blowing smoke in my mother’s face. I can remember the back of the bus, colored water fountains … I can hear a cop telling me, “Take your black butt back to nigger town.” What I tell folk … is that there are a lot of romanticists now who want to take this trip down Memory Lane, and they want to go back, and I tell the young people that anybody who wants to take you back to segregation, make sure you get a round-trip ticket because you won’t stay.

Nostalgia for the pre-Brown era would not exercise nearly so powerful a grip on Black America today if its adherents focused on its detailed, pervasive inhumanities rather than relying on gauzy glimpses.

No one has pressed this point more vividly than Robert L. Carter, who worked alongside Marshall at the LDF before eventually becoming a distinguished federal judge. He understood that to search for Brown’s impact exclusively in the educational domain is mistaken. Instead, he emphasized that Brown fomented a broad-gauge racial revolution throughout American public life. Despite Chief Justice Warren formally writing the opinion to apply exclusively to education, its attack on segregation has—paradoxically—been most efficacious beyond that original context.

[From the October 1967 issue: Jonathan Kozol’s ‘Where Ghetto Schools Fail’]

“The psychological dimensions of America’s race relations problem were completely recast” by Brown, Carter wrote. “Blacks were no longer supplicants seeking, pleading, begging to be treated as full-fledged members of the human race; no longer were they appealing to morality, to conscience, to white America’s better instincts,” he noted. “They were entitled to equal treatment as a right under the law; when such treatment was denied, they were being deprived—in fact robbed—of what was legally theirs. As a result, the Negro was propelled into a stance of insistent militancy.”

Even within the educational sphere, though, it is profoundly misguided to claim that Black students who attend solid, meaningfully integrated schools encounter environments as corrosive as, or worse than, those facing students trapped in ghetto schools. This damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t analysis suggests an entire cohort stuck in the same boat, when its many members are not even in the same ocean. The Black student marooned in a poor and violent neighborhood, with reason to fear actual murder, envies the Black student attending a rigorous, integrated school who worries about metaphorical “soul murder.” All struggles are not created equal.

This article appears in the April 2025 print edition with the headline “Was Integration the Wrong Goal?”

There is a contradiction deep within American capital punishment, driven by the stubborn fact of the Eighth Amendment: It’s licit for the government to kill people—the torture of all tortures—but not to subject them to additional pain, a protection from lesser suffering in service of greater suffering. From this confusion arises the necessity of relatively painless executions. The same people who are holding death-row prisoners captive in claustrophobic cells are the ones responsible for ensuring their comfort en route to their destruction. With that mission in mind, states are now pillaging the past for an execution method that will satisfy legal challenges based on undue suffering while still accomplishing the penalty’s aim.

On Friday, South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by firing squad; Sigmon had been convicted of the 2001 murder of his ex-girlfriend’s parents. This marked the first use of a firing squad in 15 years, the previous instance having taken place in Utah in 2010. Peculiar and violent methods of execution seem to capture the public’s imagination in a way that the death penalty itself does not: A person may support capital punishment in theory but balk at the means of actually achieving that end, which requires something more visceral than abstract assent. Accordingly, considerable media attention last week was given to the return of the firing squad—the case was thoroughly covered domestically, and even picked up by the BBC—but the next shooting execution won’t garner half as much. Unless the culture changes to reject the death penalty, new techniques, or revived and refurbished old ones, will continue to come and go.

During his execution, Sigmon was strapped into a gray chair in a steel basin with a target fixed over his chest and a hood covering his head. Witnesses watched through an observation window as the gunmen, hidden behind a wall with a cutout for rifle barrels, fired their weapons from 15 feet away and destroyed the target above Sigmon’s heart. A doctor pronounced Sigmon dead at 6:08 p.m.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: What it means to forgive the unforgivable]

As in many executing states, Sigmon was permitted to choose among three execution methods to end his life: lethal injection, electrocution, and the firing squad. He elected to be shot, citing concerns about the past several lethal injections in South Carolina, which were characterized by significant mistakes: Of particular note, a prisoner executed last month was found to have been incorrectly dosed with lethal chemicals, and his lungs were determined upon autopsy to be “massively swollen with blood and fluids,” according to a court filing by Sigmon’s legal team.

Firing-squad executions of civilians have been historically rare—the first took place in the American colonies in 1608, and since then, only 144 people have been executed by shooting. Drawing data-based conclusions about its merits relative to more widely used execution methods is therefore difficult. But Sigmon was probably right that the firing squad represents a faster and more reliable way to die than both the pseudoscientific methods produced in modernity (electrocution, gas, and lethal injection) and more antique methods such as hanging and old-world burning. In her chapter of the 2024 book The Elgar Companion to Capital Punishment and Society, the professor and legal scholar Deborah Denno points out that an electrocardiogram test conducted during a firing-squad execution in 1938 found that the prisoner’s heart stopped within seconds of being shot, and that the prisoner was pronounced dead only two minutes later. Denno adds that in one of the most medically exhaustive analyses of various execution methods, the British scientist Harold Hillman “concluded that execution by firing squad featured among the lowest levels of potential pain.”

Nevertheless, firing-squad executions were eventually superseded by methods thought to be less bloody—namely lethal injection, which arrived in the late 1970s as a medicalized and respectable means of execution analogized by some to putting animals to sleep. But the putative progress of lethal injection belied its propensity for cruel and horrific botches. Consider the 2018 case of Doyle Hamm, whose attempted execution via lethal injection lasted for roughly three hours, during which he was pierced with needles at least 11 times in the legs, feet, and groin; one needle punctured his bladder. As a result, lethal injection has been the subject of fierce litigation, which has culminated in a convincing impeachment of the technique in the public’s mind.

That litigation has also led to a particular legal development involving challenges on the grounds of the executional method: A prisoner protesting a particular method must supply a readily available alternative, which motivates states to develop protocols for additional methods. Thus lethal injection itself may soon be superseded by firing squad or suffocation via nitrogen hypoxia. The churn of old methods and new will continue indefinitely as states fight to continue executions by whatever means necessary.

If the Trump administration’s goal was to sow chaos among America’s colleges, it has definitely succeeded. Last month, the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights sent a letter to universities explaining the agency’s view that, because of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down affirmative action, any consideration of race—not just in admissions, but in hiring, scholarships, support, “and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life”—is now illegal. Even race-neutral policies intended to increase racial diversity are not allowed, the department stated. It gave schools two weeks to comply with the new guidance or risk losing their federal funding.

The reaction from universities could best be described as “panicked bewilderment,” Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University, in Florida, told me. “There’s a sense of, Should we run, hide, or counterattack?” The first challenge was figuring out what changes the department had in mind. Because the letter partly targeted “DEI,” which has no legal definition, university administrations said they weren’t sure what it applied to. Many will likely get rid of the most overt and controversial forms of DEI, such as required diversity statements for faculty, but beyond that lies an immense gray area.

Then there was the question of whether universities had to comply at all. This type of document—called a “Dear Colleague” letter—states an agency’s interpretation of the law, not the law itself. Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina, told me that the letter’s definition of what the Supreme Court has outlawed goes far beyond what the Court actually ruled. “The Court is not saying that you can’t pursue diversity, but that’s what the letter says,” he said. Already, education groups have sued to block the letter’s enforcement. The American Council on Education, a nonprofit trade group that represents universities, has told institutions that if they were following the law before Donald Trump took office, they’re still in compliance now.

Still, no school wants to be the first to find out the hard way whether that’s true. This, combined with the amorphousness of the term DEI, and the fact that so much of it was performative to begin with, has led to a flurry of nomenclature modifications—a kind of anti-woke theater. The University of Alaska system instructed departments to replace the words DEI and affirmative action with terms that communicate the “values of equal access and equal opportunity for all.” Carnegie Mellon University’s old DEI page is now titled “Inclusive Excellence.” Northwestern University has scrubbed almost all mentions of diversity from its websites. The University of Pennsylvania edited its Diversity and Inclusion website, removing most of its content and renaming it “Belonging at Penn.” The school’s former vice dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion is now the vice dean for academic excellence and engagement. The University of Southern California merged its Office of Inclusion and Diversity into its Culture Team. The University of Arizona deleted the words diversity and inclusion—from its land acknowledgment. (These schools did not directly answer when I asked whether they had made changes beyond nomenclature, other than the University of Alaska, which confirmed that it had not.)

[Graeme Wood: ‘Land acknowledgments’ are just moral exhibitionism]

These universities seem to be betting that changing job titles and editing websites will be enough to keep the Trump administration off their back. Meanwhile, they’ll continue the work of promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion—the actual things—just without using that terminology. In their view, the programs they are retaining were legal all along, because they don’t involve race-based discrimination. Services such as guiding low-income students through the financial-aid process and providing support groups for those whose parents didn’t attend college help universities recruit and retain students. “The first-order reaction is just to try to get out of the target zone,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, told me. “When the investigators seem to be using word searches to identify potential investigations, it makes all the sense in the world that you’d want to get ahead of that.” Universities are also emphasizing that identity-focused programs are open to students of all races, or expanding them so that they are, he said.

For any individual school, the odds of the federal government peering under the hood to figure out the precise difference between, say, the Office of Belonging and the Office of DEI are low. The Education Department’s civil-rights section has always been small. And Trump has repeatedly signaled that he wants to shut down the Education Department in its entirety. Even if the inquisitors are spared, investigating more than a few schools will be difficult. Many universities might conclude that as long as they don’t stand out, they'll be able to get by.

The cost of getting that bet wrong, however, could be severe. On Friday, the administration announced that it was canceling $400 million of Columbia University’s federal grants and contracts as punishment for allegedly insufficient efforts to combat anti-Semitism. The legality of the move is unclear, in part because the administration’s announcement alternately refers to “canceling” and “freezing” the funds. Black, the law professor, told me that Title VI requires a number of procedural steps before the government can revoke a university’s funding, steps that don’t appear to have been taken in Columbia’s case. Notably, however, Columbia did not announce that it would fight the decision. Rather, in a statement, it pledged “to work with the federal government to restore Columbia’s federal funding.” (According to The Wall Street Journal, Columbia will have 30 days to prove that it’s doing enough to have the grants reinstated.) “Most universities are not interested in getting into legal squabbles with the Department of Education,” Black said. “It’s like, do they like diversity? Yes. Do they like it more than not being investigated? No.”  

If some private universities are betting on lying low, public universities in red states, where state legislatures and university regents might share the Trump administration’s hostility to DEI, may have little choice but to go beyond cosmetic changes. Ohio State University shut down its Office of Diversity and Inclusion at the end of February. Ohio University postponed its Black Alumni Reunion, technically open to everyone, while it reviewed the event for compliance. When Texas banned DEI policies at the state level, the University of Texas at Austin first changed the name of its DEI office to the Division of Campus and Community Engagement. After state lawmakers said the effort was insufficient, however, the university closed the office and laid off 60 employees. Jackie Wernz, an education civil-rights lawyer and former Office of Civil Rights staffer, says that few people will mourn the name changes or the end of some diversity trainings. “It’s this other type of support that I think could have a really important impact on students,” Wernz told me. “Creating spaces on primarily white campuses for minority students to connect and to find support from staff who look like them and who come from their backgrounds.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: DEI has lost all meaning]

“DEI” is clearly dead. But it’s too soon to say what will happen to the underlying principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. On February 28, the Department of Education published an FAQ document walking back some of the most extreme implications of the Dear Colleague letter. It acknowledged, for example, that it had no power over university curricula, and that observances such as Black History Month are fine “so long as they do not engage in racial exclusion or discrimination.” Language changes and the elimination of the most overtly progressive DEI efforts might allow the Trump administration to declare its mission accomplished. “The word belonging is being used a lot,” Lake, the Stetson professor, told me. “And I think what everybody’s trying to figure out is, Is the B-word a target?” Universities are also talking about “thriving,” “retention,” and “outcomes.” They might be able to continue working toward some of the same goals they have been for decades. Just don’t call it DEI.

Unless either the governor of South Carolina or the Supreme Court intervenes, Brad Sigmon will be killed at 6pm on Friday.