Desegregation is not and was never expected to be an easy task. Racial attitudes ingrained in our Nation’s childhood and adolescence are not quickly thrown aside in its middle years. But just as the inconvenience of some cannot be allowed to stand in the way of the rights of others, so public opposition, no matter how strident, cannot be permitted to divert this Court from the enforcement of the constitutional principles at issue in this case. Today’s holding, I fear, is more a reflection of a perceived public mood that we have gone far enough in enforcing the Constitution’s guarantee of equal justice than it is the product of neutral principles of law. In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret. I dissent.
Milliken v. Bradley, 418 US 717, 814-815 (1974)(Marshall, J., dissenting)

On April 7, 1970, the Detroit Board of Education took the courageous step of adopting a voluntary integration plan. The so-called “April 7 plan” was both surgical and ingenious. It would have brought about meaningful integration of a dozen racially identifiable high schools by simply changing the elementary or junior high school feeder patterns, affecting only 9,000 out of the District’s 300,000 students. No elementary or junior high students would have been involved; moreover, the plan would have been implemented incrementally — only students entering the 10 grade would have been integrated in September 1970, those entering the 10 and 11 grades during the second year of the plan, and finally, by the 1972-73 school year, all high school classes would have been integrated.

However, the Michigan legislature, which had prompted adoption of the April 7 plan by mandating the Board decentralize gover nance of the Detroit Public Schools, exercised its constitutional authority over local school districts like Detroit’s by enacting Act 48 of the Public Acts of 1970, signed by Governor Milliken on July 7, 1970, which effectively barred implementation of the April 7 voluntary integration plan. Indeed, Section 12 of Act 48 went further, providing that “(i)n reviewing, confirming, establishing or modifying attendance provisions the first class school district boards established under the provisions of this amendatory act shall have a policy of open enrollment and shall enable students to attend a school of preference but providing priority acceptance, insofar as practicable, in cases of insufficient school capacity, to those students residing nearest the school and to those students desiring to attend the school for participation in vocationally oriented courses or other specialized curriculum.”

These events triggered the litigation that is the subject of Michelle Adams’ comprehensive new book The Containment, which chronicles the Detroit school desegregation case from start to finish. The product of 10 years of research and writing, Adams’ book is not only rich in detail with respect to every stage of the litigation but places those events in their historical and philosophical contexts: from Jim Crow to Brown v. Board of Education; from the nonviolent satyagraha of Mohandas Gandhi to Martin Luther King’s “soul force” to the “Clash in Midtown” between Black Nationalist Albert Cleage and future Board President Abraham Zwerdling, an outspoken integrationist; from the 1967 civil unrest in Detroit to the report of the Kerner Commission; from the construction of the Birwood Wall in northwest Detroit to the presidential candidacy of segregationist George Wallace; from the ascendency of Irene McCabe to the Pontiac bus bombings; from King’s assassination to the passage of the Fair Housing Act; and from the school desegregation case in Richmond, Va., to a similar case in Wilmington, Del.

Adams’ book explores the difficulty of transporting the Brown decision to segregated school districts in the north and the tragedy of the Supreme Court’s decision 20 years later, which effectively ensuring continued segregation of both schools and neighborhoods in metropolitan areas like Detroit’s. Unlike the county-wide school districts in the south, school districts in the north were small and fragmented, often gerrymandered to include property that could augment a district’s tax base. The Supreme Court’s decision to cabin desegregation plans to a single district except in the most egregious circumstances therefore brought to a halt most efforts to bring about meaningful desegregation of the nation’s major metropolitan areas.

Adams’ book is not only exceedingly well researched but carefully written. She traces the evolution of Justice Warren Burger’s opinion for the majority from his initial draft, attacking the District Court’s supposed preoccupation with racial balance, to later drafts reflecting his majority colleagues’ view that suburban school districts could not be included in a desegregation remedy where the constitutional violation took place solely within the city. Adams correctly emphasizes the fallacy of this argument on the record before the District Court, where (1) the State of Michigan’s enactment of Act 48 was central to the constitutional violation found by the District Court; and (2) under Article VIII of the Michigan Constitution of 1963, “education in Michigan belongs to the State” and (t)he school district is a State agency.” Accordingly, contrary to the majority opinion, the record evidence before the District Court met the very standard that the majority enunciated as the predicate for interdistrict relief: “Specifically, it must be shown that racially discriminatory acts of the State or local school districts, or of a single school district have been a substantial cause of interdistrict segregation.”¹

In her epilogue, Adams returns to the city of her birth and laments the current state of Detroit. She compares the city with metropolitan Louisville, Ky. One of the few jurisdictions in which plaintiffs were able to meet Milliken’s almost impossible standard for obtaining interdistrict desegregation. In the early 1970s, both Louisville and Detroit had roughly the same number of Black and white students in their school systems and similar levels of neighborhood and school segregation. However, after desegregation, the combined Louisville-Jefferson County School District and Detroit were on very different trajectories:

While Detroit’s schools were falling further into decline, the combined [Louisville] school district boasted some of the nation’s most racially integrated schools, and its school and regional population rose. Louisville enjoyed a high-quality bond rating, its neighborhoods became more racially integrated, and the tax base and job opportunities expanded….Black students in Louisville performed much better— sometimes two to three times better—on reading, math, and science tests at both the fourth- and eighth-grade levels than black students attending school in Detroit. The metropolitan school desegregation plan also had a synergistic effect on housing, promoting stable residential integration. Louisville was so enamored with metropolitan desegregation that it kept the plan in place even after a federal court said it was no longer legally required to do so.²

Moreover, research has shown that these gains did not come at the expense of the educational achievement of white students. To the contrary, research has shown that white as well as Black students benefit from being educated in racially and socioeconomically integrated schools. As Adams points out, racially diverse schools facilitate cross-racial friendships, which reduce prejudice based on biased stereotypes. She also cites research showing that white students who have attended racially diverse schools routinely report a better understanding of different viewpoints and enhanced cultural competency, leading them to seek out diverse colleges, work environments and neighborhoods later in life.

Milliken v. Bradley was an inflection point in school desegregation jurisprudence, and Michelle Adams has written the definitive work on the subject. Those of us who live in the Detroit metropolitan area owe her a debt of gratitude for laboring for over a decade to help us revisit that tumultuous time in our history and to imagine how our lives might be different today, 50 years later, if just one more justice had envisioned the long-term consequences of the Court’s decision.