Michigan prohibited segregation in public education decades before the Supreme Court did the same for the nation in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Yet nearly 20 years after Brown, the public schools in Detroit remained almost totally segregated. The story of how that happened, the failed effort to change it, and the implications for public education and civil rights today is the subject of Michelle Adams’s splendid new book, “The Containment.”
The Detroit schools were segregated not because a law required it, but because the city, like virtually everywhere in the United States, operated on a neighborhood school model. And since Detroit’s neighborhoods were highly segregated — 99 percent white in some areas and 95 percent Black in others in 1970 — its schools were, too. Why? Because, Adams writes, of a longstanding policy of containment: a system of government and private actions that kept the city’s Black citizens confined to a handful of neighborhoods in Detroit and out of the suburbs altogether. The tools of the containment included racially restrictive covenants in housing deeds (no sales to Black people allowed), redlining (mortgages for Black home buyers only in certain areas), as well as segregated public housing and segregated real estate salesperson associations.
“The Containment” follows the lawsuit, filed in 1970 by the N.A.A.C.P., to integrate Detroit’s schools. In this objective, the civil rights group eventually found an unlikely but revealing ally: the Citizens Committee for Better Education, which represented the already shrinking white population of the northern part of the city, an area bordered, as all Eminem fans know, by the road known as Eight Mile.
The C.C.B.E. originally entered the case as an opponent of the N.A.A.C.P. In time, however, the C.C.B.E. became a partner of sorts, because its members — mostly working-class white families — began arguing to the federal judge Stephen J. Roth that it was unfair to place the burden of integration exclusively on the whites of Detroit, who could not afford to move north of Eight Mile, while shielding their wealthier white neighbors in the suburbs. Roth, a conservative Democrat and former state attorney general, ultimately saw the logic of the argument. In this way, Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, “Common Ground,” which told the story of the struggle over the desegregation of Boston’s public schools at around the same time.
In June 1972, Judge Roth ordered a broad integration plan, which included such prosperous suburbs as Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills in the same “metropolitan” school district as Detroit. That is, he established a system of “busing” — a word that was every bit as politically incendiary at that time as “trans” is today. The suburbs recoiled in horror, and politicians joined in.
On May 16, 1972, George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor, had ridden an antibusing platform to a smashing victory in the Michigan Democratic presidential primary. (He had been shot and paralyzed in Maryland the previous day.) Richard Nixon, running for re-election, had demanded “an immediate halt to all new busing orders by federal courts,” and his campaign responded to Roth’s ruling with a TV ad declaring: “President Nixon believes busing is wrong. And he intends to do something about it.” Meanwhile, the state of Michigan appealed Roth’s order to the Supreme Court in a case called Milliken v. Bradley.
The issue before the court was profound. In Brown, the court held that segregating students by race was unconstitutional, but how did this ruling apply to schools located in neighborhoods that happened to be racially segregated — in other words, when racial separation was not a binding policy of the school district (de jure segregation) but the reality of the community (de facto segregation)? By 1974, Nixon had placed four new justices on the court, and they formed the core of the 5-to-4 majority that voted that July to overturn Roth’s desegregation plan on the grounds that the Constitution compelled states to remedy only de jure, not de facto, segregation. (Roth himself died of a heart attack at 66, just before the Supreme Court’s decision was announced.)
In an apt summary, Adams writes that Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion was “grounded in white innocence. … There was no acknowledgment of how Blacks were locked in specific Detroit neighborhoods and mostly Black schools, and then into an ever-expanding urban core that was hermetically sealed off from the suburbs.” Though a subsequent, much more modest plan by Roth’s successor, another federal judge, attempted to address segregation within Detroit, it affected just 10 percent of the students in the city’s school system and left many schools untouched. (Adams observes that in this period, there was actually more successful court-ordered integration in the public schools of the South, because municipalities there tended to include the suburbs, while in the North suburban towns were often legally separate from the cities they abutted.) In all, as Adams puts it, “Milliken was where the promise of Brown ended.”
If anything, Adams, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, understates the continuing effect of Milliken and its prohibition on metropolitan desegregation orders. She writes about white flight to the suburbs and their public schools, but little about white flight to private and parochial schools. (Adams notes that she is a Black Detroiter whose parents sent her to a mostly white private school in the suburbs.) The white population of Detroit’s public schools currently hovers at about 2 percent.
Adams recognizes that there is a long history in the Black community, including in Detroit, of hostility to integration, or, to put it another way, of belief in Black self-sufficiency. The theory goes that Black excellence in all matters, including in education, does not require the presence of whites. (Justice Clarence Thomas is now a leading advocate for this view.)
But Adams is firm in her belief, like that of Justice Thurgood Marshall and many others, that students thrive most in diverse settings. As she writes, the research shows that “students in racially and socioeconomically integrated schools and classrooms have stronger academic outcomes and higher test scores, are more likely to enroll in college, have higher earnings and health outcomes as adults, and are less likely to become incarcerated.”
In the half-century since Milliken, the Supreme Court, as well as the evolving structure of the American economy, has made those kinds of public schools only harder to find. “The Containment” explains why.
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