The country must celebrate the unprecedented improvements the "Brown v. Board of Education" ruling has brought about in the education of black students. At the same time, it must also be acknowledged that "Brown" did not and could not completely resolve the struggle that has shaped questions of race and education in the U.S. for nearly 400 years. In this paper, the authors argue that the intransigence of white supremacy in U.S. public education informs the contradictory role that school desegregation policy has played in the education of black students the past 50 years. Specifically, the authors examine the textured legacy of "Brown" in the context of an ethnographic analysis of the academic and social lives of black male students at City High School (CHS), a magnet academy located in the Midwest United States. The authors argue in this paper that the intransigent nature of white supremacy in post-Civil Rights era public schools and the way it shapes how educators, researchers, and policy-makers view, educate, and evaluate black students in general accounts for color-coded inequalities that are observable in public schools such as CHS.