Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, a unanimous ruling that racial segregation in America’s public schools was unconstitutional. With its declaration that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” the court established that any government action to segregate students violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.
The 1954 decision struck an unequivocal blow against segregated school facilities in the Jim Crow South. But as Michelle Adams demonstrates in “The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North,” its implications for the rest of the United States were less clear-cut. Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, offers a forceful, insightful account of the failed effort to use Brown to integrate public schools in her hometown of Detroit.
The narrative centers on Milliken v. Bradley, decided by the Supreme Court in 1974. The case began as a lawsuit filed in 1970 by the Detroit branch of the NAACP and a number of Detroit families attempting to integrate the city’s schools. Of course, segregation wasn’t legal in Michigan at the time. “In fact, just the opposite was true,” Adams observes. “Michigan state law had prohibited segregation in public education since 1842. Yet the schools in Detroit were still racially segregated.” The pressing question, in the author’s words: “Did Brown have any application in the Motor City?”
Why We Wrote This
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate but equal” educational facilities were unconstitutional. The remedy, for many cities, was busing to address racial segregation. In Detroit, the stakes were especially high.
The answer would hinge on whether the courts saw northern segregation as de jure (resulting from state action) or de facto (resulting from happenstance). The plaintiffs in the 1970 lawsuit argued that the segregation of the Detroit school system was de jure. They presented evidence that the city had bused Black children to majority-Black schools even when they lived closer to majority-white schools; they showed that the school board had gerrymandered school zones to maintain segregation.
But the evidence that seemed to have the greatest impact on federal judge Stephen J. Roth concerned “the containment.” The term described the fact that Detroit’s Black population was prevented, through a combination of public and private actions, from living outside of the central city. “Black Detroiters were stuck, hemmed in, corralled,” the author writes.
In her thorough, compelling summary of the 41-day trial, Adams shows how the plaintiffs painstakingly established that school segregation was primarily a result of residential segregation. They further demonstrated that residential segregation resulted not from personal choice – i.e., happenstance – but from racial discrimination that kept Black people in Detroit while white people abandoned the city for the suburbs. The attorneys cited restrictive covenants that prevented the sales of homes to Black people, redlining, mortgage lending discrimination, and segregation in public housing. The evidence ended up revealing, in the author’s words, “how northern segregation was created, maintained, and perpetuated.”
It also made a believer out of Roth. Initially skeptical of the plaintiffs’ claims, the judge underwent what one of the attorneys in the case called “a dramatic conversion.” Roth became convinced that the Black schoolchildren of Detroit were the victims of constitutional violations. He further concluded that because the city’s schools were overwhelmingly Black, they could not be meaningfully integrated without a plan that included the suburbs. The remedy would view Detroit and its suburbs as one metropolitan school district.
That remedy would necessarily involve busing students to desegregate the metropolitan area’s schools. Busing was politically explosive, and Adams reports that media coverage of the case focused more on the busing angle than on the segregation that busing was intended to rectify.
Roth’s ruling was largely upheld by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals before being appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had upheld busing as a means to integrate schools in 1971, but by the time Milliken v. Bradley made it onto the docket, the court’s makeup had changed dramatically. Four of the nine justices had been appointed by President Richard Nixon in his first term, resulting in a much more conservative panel. The 5-4 decision in Milliken reversed Roth, ruling that Detroit’s suburban districts could not be forced to be part of the city’s desegregation plan.
Adams is an excellent guide through these complex proceedings, writing with authority and clarity. She is also a Black native of Detroit, so this story is personal for her. Adams’ father was a successful criminal defense lawyer in the city, but her parents had to find a white intermediary to buy property in the white neighborhood where they lived. Growing up, she traveled by bus to a mostly white private school in a Detroit suburb. She is passionate about the benefits of integrated educational settings for students of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds.
But that vision did not take root in northern cities. “More than any other single case,” Adams writes, “Milliken v. Bradley is where the promise of Brown v. Board of Education ended.” Thurgood Marshall, as a civil rights lawyer, had argued Brown before the Supreme Court. Years later, as a Supreme Court justice, he wrote a dissenting opinion in Milliken. Marshall lamented that as a result of the ruling, Black children in Detroit would “receive the same separate and unequal education in the future as they have been unconstitutionally afforded in the past.”
Adams reports that Detroit’s public school district, whose current population is around 2% white and overwhelmingly low-income, ranks among the lowest-performing urban districts in the nation. She calls Marshall’s dissent “elegiac.” Sadly, it also appears to have been prescient.
