Michelle Adams, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme
Court, and the Battle For Racial Justice in the North, (NY: Farrar. Straus
and Giroux, 2025), 389 pages
In the prologue to The Containment author Michelle
Adams offers some personal background of growing up in the Palmer Park
neighborhood of Detroit, enrolling in the Roeper City and Country School in
1967, finishing high school in 1981 and later becoming a civil rights attorney
and University of Michigan law professor.
As an attorney Adams wrote an amicus brief on behalf of the
National Parent Teachers Association in the 2006 case of Parents Involved in
Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. The Seattle case erupted
over another dispute from a race-based effort to integrate Schools, much like
the one in The Containment back in Detroit in the 1960’s. The new case
offered the John Roberts Court the opportunity to strike another blow against
race based integration, which it did. No surprise there but she explains it was
the failure of Justice Breyer’s dissent to connect overturning Brown v. the
Board of Education to Detroit in the 1960’s that motivated her to tell that
story.
The book is divided into three parts, each with eight
chapters. Part I, entitled the Soul Force, describes the segregated Detroit
schools in the 1960’s and narrates the contending arguments and proposals to
relieve it. Adams provides names and short biographical sketches of the many people
and their arguments for change to help readers sort through the history. Several
factions offered proposals to bring black community control while others proposed
various plans for integration with the School Board the focus of protest and
demands for change.
The Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education made
government sponsored segregation, defined as de jure segregation, an
unconstitutional denial of equal protection, but de facto segregation existed in
Detroit given blacks and whites lived in segregated communities and went to
segregated schools. The NAACP sponsored a search for the evidence that
segregation was intentional as opposed to the benign result of individual
choice.
When the Detroit Board of Education voted to approve an
integration plan after considerable debate and discussion, widespread
opposition blocked its use. Next, an alternative proposal by then state
representative Coleman Young was signed into law as Public Act 48 on July 7,
1970. It partitioned Detroit schools into 8 districts with 4 having a black voting
majority and 4 having a white voting majority, but it had nothing about
integration; it satisfied no one. Part I ends when Detroiters recalled the school
board in a vote August 4, 1970.
Part II, entitled the Containment, starts with the case of Bradley
v. Milliken, a case challenging Public Act 48. Plaintiff Vera Bradley was a
black mother with a son in a Detroit elementary school and Milliken was William
Milliken, Michigan Governor. The complaint alleged de jure segregation and that
the Board had been deliberately segregating the schools for many years. Adams needs
130 pages to narrate the case through the federal court from an initial August
27, 1970 hearing before Judge Philip Roth to his June 14, 1972 order to carry
out a Metropolitan School Plan to be completed by 1973.
The narrative covers a skeptical Judge Roth who denied a
motion to restore the Board’s integration plan, which the NAACP appealed to the
6th Circuit Court. The court’s opinion concluded “State action in
any form, whether by statute, act of the executive department of a state or local
government . . . will not be permitted to impede, delay, or frustrate
proceedings to protect the rights guaranteed to members of all races under the
Fourteenth Amendment.” The 6th circuit remanded the case to Judge
Roth and a trial followed.
Adams provides a thorough and detailed discussion of the evidence
and proceedings of the trial, including a review of public comments and their newspaper
and TV coverage as well as the legal influence of related school integration cases
from other cities. One of the many new attorneys to the case explained
“Containment” to Judge Roth as “not a fortuitous phenomenon” . . . but . . .
“the result of private and public housing discrimination.” Adams commented that
“blacks were viewed as contagions to be quarantined and avoided at all costs.”
Trial evidence included detailed maps of black and white Detroiters
living separately, restrictive racial covenants enforced by courts, Federal
Housing Administration and federal Home Loan Owners Association discriminatory policy,
mortgage lending “redlining,” real estate agents and brokerage discriminatory policy
and practice. After ten days of trial, defendants admitted Detroit was
segregated. The trial went on with testimony of Dr. Robert Green, a professor of
educational psychology and then to testimony of parents and their experience in
segregated schools that included busing black children through white
neighborhoods to segregated black schools.
On September 27, 1971 Judge Roth made his “Ruling on Issue
of Segregation” concluding Detroit segregation was the result of intentional
practices, that the state of Michigan assisted in operating and maintaining the
system in violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th
amendment. Judge Roth did not offer a desegregation plan but instructed the
plaintiffs and defendants to discuss and propose desegregation plans. As discussion
got underway Governor Milliken announced the state would appeal Judge Roth’s
decision in a speech November 3, 1971. Judge Roth’s metropolitan desegregation
order did not come until June 14, 1972, but opponents and proponents were
already aligned to fight or defend cross district integration the newspapers
labeled as “busing.” Part II ends.
The concluding Part III follows the legal steps to the end
of the case. As promised Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley appealed to the
6th Circuit Court July 13, 1972. In December, the 6th Circuit
upheld Judge Roth. Michigan then
appealed to the entire 15 judges of the 6th Circuit, known as “en banc”
review. The 6th Circuit affirmed Judge Roth again. Michigan requested
a hearing before the Supreme Court, which became the case of Milliken v.
Bradley. On July 25, 1974 the Supreme Court overruled Judge Roth’s order and sent
the case back to the district court to devise a Detroit only integration plan.
Judge Roth had passed away and a new Judge, Robert DeMascio, was charged with
developing a Detroit only integration plan in a school district
Adams adds a thorough narrative of the politics connected to
the final legal ruling in these Part III chapters. By now school integration
efforts are routinely referred to as busing in national news coverage. Adams devotes
a chapter to Richard Nixon and his opposition to busing and dislike of the
egalitarian views of the Warren Court. There are profiles of Lewis Powell,
William Rehnquist, and Warren Burger that Nixon appoints to the Supreme Court.
Another chapter narrates the rationalizations the justices employed to overturn
metropolitan school desegregation. Justice Powell did an especially good job deceiving
himself that his opinion was all about law and not his white, upper class view
of the world. Other justuces ignored that state governments are sovereign and
can control schools and redraw school boundaries at any time. The Court’s
ruling justified segregation and turned suburban borders into immutable barriers
black children cannot cross on the way to school, like fences Adams suggests. The
Milliken v. Bradley ruling repeats Plessy v. Ferguson with another separate but
equal ruling for the 20th century and beyond.
The final two chapters fast forward to the present to
explore consequences from the Milliken v. Bradley and Detroit segregation in
2025. A 12 page epilogue describes the author’s 2019 return to Detroit with
some musing and reflections. Editors and authors like to end books on a
positive note, but doing so here was a struggle. In the last four pages Adams remarks
on the threats of continuing racism in a nation that feels “like two warring
tribes” maintaining a “sanitized” education system that evades the truth. Adams
mentions January 6 and current racist division like Tucker Carlson and the “great
replacement theory” in a country where we must not “forget our boats rise
together or they don’t rise at all.”
The Containment has many people and many related court cases
that makes the book complex, but it avoids legalese and reads as well thought
out history rather than journalism. Adams has a cast of characters’ list and their
part at the beginning of the book and it is well documented at the end. Adams avoids
mention of the depressing trump, but keeping him out of the story did not help me
feel optimistic about the future. No boats rise now in the United States.
