The Containment

August 1, 2024

Adams, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, writes about the social and legal struggle to integrate the schools of Detroit's suburbs and the 1974 Supreme Court decision in the Milliken v. Bradley case, which stopped school desegregation in the North. Prepub Alert.

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October 1, 2024
The 1954 landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision struck down state-mandated "separate but equal" educational facilities in the South. A decade later, the Bradley v. Milliken case exemplified the difficult fight to end de facto segregation in schools nationwide. Detroit was a nexus of the Great Migration. Redlining, restrictive covenants, and housing policies promoted by private, state, and federal housing authorities kept the city and surrounding suburbs segregated by race. Public schools were located in neighborhoods that ensured they were also segregated. Majority Black schools suffered from inadequate facilities and staffing and unsanitary conditions. In Bradley v. Milliken, filed in August 1970, the federal court ruled that schools in Detroit's surrounding counties should be included in the desegregation plan to ameliorate the residential containment of the Black population. But having taken a rightward turn under the Nixon presidency, the Supreme Court struck down the ruling in 1974. In this comprehensive and well-documented history, legal scholar and Detroit native Adams brings the issues and people surrounding the case to life and explains its ongoing impact.

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Starred review from November 11, 2024
In this riveting debut history from Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, a 1970 school integration plan proposed by liberal members of the Detroit Board of Education kicks off a contentious legal battle that results in the Supreme Court effectively ending school desegregation in the North. The narrative features fine-grained character portraits of such key players as Nathaniel Jones (the “measured” NAACP lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court) and Stephen J. Roth (a cantankerous federal judge who ruled in the NAACP’s favor) set against scenes that capture the city’s tumult during the integration effort—most of it provoked by irate anti-integration white parents. Adams’s meticulous recapping of the NAACP’s trial arguments serves as a disturbing window onto how Northern states created and maintained segregation—for instance, by situating public housing to avoid mixed-race developments and discouraging realtors from showing Black homebuyers houses in white neighborhoods. The overwhelming evidence convinced the skeptical Roth, who ordered a metropolitan integration plan that would have incorporated school districts from Detroit and its predominantly white suburbs, only for the Supreme Court to scrap Roth’s plan as an unacceptable violation of school district autonomy, a decision that marked the Burger Court’s turn away from the pro–racial justice leanings of the Warren Court. Rich in detail yet sprawling in scope, this shouldn’t be missed.

December 1, 2024
Legal examination of the retrenchment that followed theBrown v. Board desegregation ruling. Can there be desegregation in schooling without desegregation in housing, employment, and other aspects of society? Legal scholar Adams examines the Supreme Court's 1974 rulings in theMilliken v. Bradley case, an outgrowth of lawsuits concerning Detroit public schools. A commentary on and reversal ofBrown v. Board of Education, those rulings forged a distinction between de facto and de jure segregation: If Black people lived together in one community and white people lived together in another, wasn't that just the way they chose to be, in that "the racial cast of Detroit's neighborhoods was entirely voluntary?" Disingenuously, the Supreme Court, already beginning to drift rightward, answered yes, overlooking an observation from a decade earlier on the part of Lyndon Johnson: "Employment is often dependent on education, education on neighborhood schools and housing, housing on income, and income on employment." Notes Adams, Justice Stephen Breyer opined years after the fact thatBrown was exemplary of a better society in which we all lived together, but inMilliken, its preceding legal contests, played out in Detroit over years in the 1960s and early 1970s, presupposed that white people and Black people lived in separate neighborhoods by choice. The district court saw it differently: Whereas, as Adams notes, layer on layer of covenants kept Black people in the city but encouraged white flight to the suburbs, busing and other efforts to desegregate the schools were in force until the Supreme Court stepped in. In Adams' view, closing this well-written and well-argued study, the court's decision effectively upheld segregation and undidBrown, and the racial inequalities in public schooling continue unabated today. Nuanced critique of a judicial ruling that, by design or not, upholds separation and supremacism.

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