Half a century ago the civil rights movement’s effort to carry the campaign for school desegregation from the South to the urban North ended in failure. In The Containment, Michelle Adams’s account of how that effort was effectively shut down by public opposition, opportunistic politics, and a hostile Supreme Court, there are powerful parallels with today’s turn against the goal of racial equality.
Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, doesn’t draw these parallels explicitly. Her book tells the story of Milliken v. Bradley, a Supreme Court case from 1974, which invalidated a federal district judge’s desegregation order that encompassed not only Detroit’s heavily Black schools but also the nearly all-white schools of fifty-two surrounding suburban school districts. Without a multidistrict plan, the judge had found, there were not enough white children in Detroit’s schools to remedy the city’s unconstitutional segregation. His solution was racially conscious school assignments across three counties, and a federal appeals court agreed. The Supreme Court did not.
Just a few years earlier, the country appeared to be nearing a settlement on questions of race, with courts finally embracing the obligation to fulfill the promise of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) in the South, where segregation had been enforced by law. Segregation in the North, meanwhile, remained entrenched in many urban school districts, presenting the civil rights movement with an obvious if challenging target. How the Supreme Court that rejected the legal regime of segregation in Brown might have responded to the effort to “take Brown north,” where segregation was maintained by political and social forces but not by statute, we will never know. Richard Nixon’s election in 1968 ushered in a period of fundamental change at the Court. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who had written the unanimous Brown decision, retired the next year, followed in rapid succession by three other justices. As Milliken v. Bradley reached the repopulated Court, time ran out.
The Milliken majority did not question the facts that a forty-one-day trial had established: Detroit’s schools were disproportionately Black, and only a metropolitan-wide order could provide enough white students to achieve meaningful integration in the city. But because the suburban school districts had not been “shown to have committed any constitutional violation,” wrote Chief Justice Warren’s successor, Warren Burger, it was “wholly impermissible” to include them in a remedy. The constitutional right of Detroit’s Black schoolchildren, he declared, “is to attend a unitary school system in that district.” Period. The vote was 5–4, with the four Nixon appointees in the majority.