You hear the argument in different contexts, always cited to explain some degree of our present miserable condition: economic decline, loss of communal values, urban decay, dwindling numbers of black marriages — even the inane content of contemporary hip hop. It has become a catch-all explanation, the substance of things we never hoped for and the evidence of bad things we've seen. The mantra is this: Integration Is To Blame. "We have," one elder informed me, "lost our minds ever since we got integrated." And at the heart of this indictment is the case of Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

May 17, 2004 marks the 50th anniversary of the most significant legal decision of the 20th Century. Brown set into motion titanic forces that have reverberated down to our present days. For what it matters, the current debates over the use of the Confederate emblem in the state flag of Georgia has its roots in the post-Brown backlash of Southern nationalism (states adopted Confederate imagery for their national flags during the 1950s as a means of symbolically resisting the federal order to dismantle segregation). The case marked the culmination of four decades of efforts by the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to overturn the doctrine of "separate but equal" that had come out of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. It became a defining moment for a Supreme Court led by Earl Warren — a newly appointed Chief Justice who had, as attorney general for California, presided over the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.

But the case had its black critics from day one. Zora Neale Hurston wrote that "I regard the ruling of the US Supreme Court to be insulting. I see no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white social affair." Hurston believed that the case actually affirmed white supremacy by assuming blacks would learn more when seated next to whites. Sarah Bulah, a Delaware mother whose lawsuit against that state's segregated school system eventually became part of the Brown class-action suit, found herself ostracized by friends, neighbors and even fellow church members (her pastor argued that the colored-only school near the church was "handy").

Some had personal motives for opposing the decision: Southern states frequently offered to pay the full tuition of black applicants to their segregated law and graduate schools if they would leave the state and enroll integrated institutions in the North. Still others argued that the case was evidence of middle-class Negroes' desire to be next to whites at all costs.

Even then, these arguments required a certain kind of near-sightedness in order to work. A generation of black lawyers had fought against the unequal apportionment of funds to black schools year after year, only to find that their expensive legal victories yielded only temporary changes — school districts re-established the old patterns after making cosmetic improvements to the black schools. On one level, the push for "integration" hoped to turn the logic of racism against itself, to place black children and white children in the same facilities and thereby make it impossible to under-fund any school without harming white children as well as blacks. It was more strategic than critics assumed.

But the criticism of the Brown decision has not abated 50 years later. In history, there is something we might call the Funeral Effect. This phenomenon explains how both deceased individuals and dead traditions are spoken of in warm, nostalgic tones, no matter how much havoc they created when they were alive. The Funeral Effect explains Russians who look at the bleakness of their present and yearn for the halcyon days of the Stalinism. It explains the conversation I had with a frustrated young black South African in Cape Town last summer. After detailing his inability to find work and his frustration with the government, he said to me, "Things were better under apartheid."

And the Funeral Effect explains why Joseph Lowry of SCLC has famously quipped that blacks had fought to get into the mainstream "only to find that it was polluted," and why legal scholar Derrick Bell has publicly questioned the wisdom of the desegregation efforts he helped to organize during the early 1960s. Fueling this perspective is a vision of black life that thrived despite the strictures of Jim Crow: neighborhoods filled with black-owned businesses, Negro League baseball teams and schools filled with black teachers devoted to nurturing the potential of their charges. This phenomenon almost always requires dimming the spotlight on the injustices of the past.

But nostalgia generally makes for bad history.

Almost all of the stadiums in which Negro league teams played where white-owned. There were indeed significant black business districts — notably in Pittsburgh, Tulsa, Atlanta and Washington, DC. But as early as the 1910s, there were complaints of black communities having too few black-owned businesses. James Baldwin wrote of his childhood that he — and most other black Harlemites — resented the poor treatment they received from white (in this case Jewish) merchants and landlords in the community.

The worst-case scenarios that many feared would be the legacy of "integration" have generally not come to pass. Historically black colleges have been largely successful in their attempts to attract talented students, despite the option of attending majority institutions. Black churches have remained vital cultural and political institutions. Integration has been cited for the decline of the black press. In the years after Brown, periodicals like The Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, The Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Afro-American either folded or saw their significance dwindle. Talented black journalists found employment with white newspapers (many were hired on the spot to cover the urban uprisings of the 1960s, when editors feared sending in white reporters to black neighborhoods). Even so, it's hard to solely blame integration for the demise of the black press — the decline of these journals began in the early 1960s, a period when the overall number of newspapers in the United States decreased because of competition with television news coverage.

In a real sense, the concern over "integration" is a straw man. A recent Harvard University report concluded that black children were more likely to go to an all-black school in 2004 than they were in 1968. In criticizing integration, people are ultimately voicing a longing for the signposts of community. (White Republicans are not the only people longing for a simpler, long-gone era.) At a time when it is difficult to understand the complex commonalities tying black people together, many are longing for an era when geography at least was our common denominator. Still, it is possible to value community — voluntary community — without airbrushing the legal fascism practiced in this country between 1896 and 1954.