Racial integration, or simply integration, includes desegregation (the process of ending systematic racial segregation). In addition to desegregation, integration includes goals such as leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws on diverse traditions, rather than merely bringing a racial minority into the majority culture. Desegregation is largely a legal matter, integration largely a social one.

Morris J. MacGregor, Jr. in his paper Integration of the Armed Forces 1940-1969 writes concerning the words integration and desegregation:

...In recent years many historians have come to distinguish between these like-sounding words.. The movement toward desegregation, breaking down the nations Jim Crow system, became increasingly popular in the decade after World War II. Integration, on the other hand, Professor Oscar Handlin maintains, implies several things not yet necessarily accepted in all areas of American society. In one sense it refers to the levelling of all barriers to association other than those based on ability, taste, and personal preference;[1] in other words, providing equal opportunity. But in another sense integration calls for the random distribution of a minority throughout society. Here, according to Handlin, the emphasis is on racial balance in areas of occupation, education, residency, and the like.

From the beginning the military establishment rightly understood that the breakup of the all-black unit would in a closed society necessarily mean more than mere desegregation. It constantly used the terms integration and equal treatment and opportunity to describe its racial goals. Rarely, if ever, does one find the word desegregation in military files that include much correspondence.[1]

Similarly, Keith M. Woods writing on the need for precision in journalistic language writes, Integration happens when a monolith is changed, like when a black family moves into an all-white neighborhood. Integration happens

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