The heroes of Black History Month are the familiar leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ella Baker, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Every February, we celebrate these men and women for championing the self-evident: racial segregation was immoral, integration a moral imperative. Law finally caught up with morality when the “separate but equal” doctrine was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education, forcing school integration.
Yet something seems off about these pieties in 2025. Against a backdrop of broad discontent with liberalism, including among black Americans increasingly drawn to Trumpism, it’s worth returning to a provocative set of questions posed by the black writer Harold Cruse in the wake of civil rights: what if separate but equal contained a good idea, a better idea than advocating for racial integration above all else? Shouldn’t black activism focus on building the capacity of black communities, rather than looking to open up opportunities for the black elite?
