Although the two terms are commonly conflated, “desegregation” did not, in practice, mean the same thing as “integration.” To be sure, many whites acquiesced to court-ordered desegregation, but that did not mean they were themselves willing to share public spaces with blacks. A majority of white Atlantans recoiled at the thought of social contact between the races, which they more commonly disdained as “interracial intimacy.”
