Every so often, some scholar will come up with the dumb idea that they are helping black children if they send them far away from their neighborhoods and support systems. They’ll argue to forcefully take “talented” black children from underachieving schools and ship them off to some isolated environment where no other black person can be found for miles.

It is no coincidence that New York City’s most underachieving schools are located in African-American neighborhoods that are populated by black and brown students. Principals tell stories of outdated textbooks, a lack of computers, and the influx of newly hired white teachers with virtually no experience working in communities of color. Many stay for a year or two and then push off to another school or leave the system altogether.

Paul Robeson High School for Business and Technology in Brooklyn is perhaps the best example of how black schools can thrive under the right leadership. Although most of principal Ira Weston’s students have been labeled as at risk, Mr. Weston, who is African-American, has taken a special interest in them. With few resources, in a short time he has turned the school around, recently sending graduates to the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.

Mr. Weston has lofty ideas for this Crown Heights school that others have long written off. He believes in these students, stopping them in the hallways to buttonhole them about college.

“We are not segregated out of a sense of inferiority,” Mr. Weston said.

Robeson High still has a long way to go. Only 60% of the students here graduate and go off to college. A large portion of the students are performing below average, forcing Mr. Weston to take such steps as initiating 15 partnerships with outside institutions like Citicorp and recruiting a group of aging alumni from Princeton University to come into the school to tutor students several days a week.

Mr. Weston faces some of the same dilemmas as other school principals working in African-American neighborhoods: not enough resources to service a public school system whose population is larger than some American cities.

“I am not afraid to ask for help,” Mr. Weston, who taught in China and Kenya before winning a fellowship in the early 1980s to attend Teacher’s College at Columbia University, said. “We have to bring resources into the school from outside of the building.”

Five decades after Brown v. Board of Education, the widespread belief that the modern-day civil rights movement was primarily about the integration of African-Americans into mainstream American society is the biggest myth that surrounds the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision. The prevailing assumption among many whites – and some blacks, too – was that if black children just had the opportunity to learn their alphabet alongside white students they would be advantaged.

The reality is that long before African-Americans were permitted to attend predominantly white schools, they excelled in their studies at black institutions. Colleges such as Lincoln University and Howard University sprung up in part because African-Americans were restricted from attending white colleges and universities. When W.E.B. DuBois, the first African-American to gain a Ph.D. from Harvard University, could not gain a job at a white school, he taught at Fisk and Clark universities – two historically black schools.

Although we romanticize the Brown v. Board decision, the truth is that at the time many African-Americans resisted the idea of sending their children to all white schools. Many did not protest the racial makeup of their schools. They embraced the notion that their children were being taught African-American history by black teachers. What they resented was the lack of resources that these black schools were given in comparison to the white schools across town.

My parents attended black public high schools in Philadelphia and they did not feel inferior. In fact, at the time, they were baffled and scared for the African-American high-schoolers who attempted to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., against the backdrop of a lynch mob. Black students often were subjected to forms of violence and were angrily taunted by white children and teachers. When busing was ordered in Boston in the 1970s, for example, an angry white mob routinely attacked school buses that carried black children from their neighborhoods to predominantly white schools several miles away.

Integration alone was never the goal. The goal was the fight for freedom, the right of African-Americans to choose which schools they wanted to send their children to, but it was not about having black children merely sit next to white children in classrooms.

Public schools need to be equalized, not necessarily integrated.