Equality Quote by Ed Smith

A line like this lands with a sting because it refuses the tidy, victory-lap version of civil rights history. “Integration” is framed as an achievement with a bill attached, and the bill is paid in something harder to measure than legal access: the internal cohesion of a community that had built parallel institutions under segregation.

The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Prices” implies a transaction, not pure progress. It needles the liberal assumption that opening doors automatically improves lives in every dimension. Then “disintegration” mirrors “integration” with almost cruel symmetry, turning what sounds like an unambiguous good into a force that can unravel. It’s rhetorical jujitsu: one word is made to haunt the other.

The subtext is a critique of how policy wins can scramble local ecosystems. Once schools, businesses, churches, civic groups, and professional networks are no longer forced to operate inside a constrained Black marketplace, the most resourced families and talent can flow outward. Historically, integration sometimes coincided with Black teachers and principals losing jobs as schools consolidated, Black-owned businesses losing captive customers, and neighborhood institutions losing their centrality. The promise was equal access; the unintended consequence could be institutional hollowing-out.

There’s also an edge of intracommunity politics here: a warning against mistaking proximity to whiteness for power, or assuming that dispersal equals advancement. The line doesn’t argue for segregation; it argues that freedom of movement can come with a loss of collective leverage, shared spaces, and cultural continuity. It works because it forces the listener to hold two truths at once: integration can be necessary, and still costly.