The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

by Michelle Adams

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A meticulously detailed account of a momentous case in American history. Michelle Adams gives readers and in-depth look at the pursuit of racial equality by examining where we've been — and where we're going.

“Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground.” —Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review

“Passionate and well researched.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker

The epic story of Detroit’s struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs—and the defeat of desegregation in the North.

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?

In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight—and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate—and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374721787
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/14/2025
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	528
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.

Editorial Reviews

"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground . . . In the [past] half-century . . . the Supreme Court . . . has made [diverse] public schools only harder to find. The Containment explains why." —Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)

"Passionate and well researched." —Louis Menand, The New Yorker

"Adams chronicles the case with a compelling blend of academic rigor, reportorial legwork and engaging prose . . . Instructive." —Michael Bobelian, The Washington Post

"Spectacular . . . the best deep history of a case in decades." —John Fabian Witt, professor of law and history at Yale University and author of The Radical Fund and Lincoln's Code

"Adams provides a tour de force account of the epic struggle for racial justice in public schools that was derailed by a conservative Supreme Court." —Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier

"Adams deftly illuminates the complex history and significance of the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley . . . [The Containment] is a riveting narrative that sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system in the 1960s and early 1970s, digging deep to tell the story about a creative, hard-fought attempt at metropolitan desegregation.” —BookPage (starred review)

“Michelle Adams has written a truly beautiful, intimate, and powerful history of ordinary Detroiters’ determined fight to finally ensure equality of opportunity for Black children. As she makes painfully clear, the educational and residential segregation that came to devastate the country thereafter was not at all inevitable. It was an active choice and a legal betrayal on the part of too many Americans who were on the wrong side of history but whose short-sightedness might yet be undone.” —Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

“It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the federal courts were committed to the pursuit of racial justice. In her mesmerizing new book, Michelle Adams re-creates the landmark case that shattered that commitment. The Containment is a history you have to read to understand the nation we’ve become.” —Kevin Boyle, National Book Award–winning author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age

"Michelle Adams has written the definitive history of Milliken v. Bradley, one of the most important Supreme Court cases of all time. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Containment fundamentally changes how we understand the history of civil rights. This page-turner illuminates how battles over school desegregation shaped cities and suburbs, and explains why issues like affirmative action remain political battlegrounds today." —Matthew F. Delmont, Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth and author of Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

“How did the United States turn away from the promise of racial integration and quality education? Michelle Adams illuminates the schooling and housing practices in the North that separated whites and Blacks; the judge who tried remedial action; the politicians and justices who halted integration and spurred white flight from cities; and American law and ideals. With compelling narrative and powerful analysis, this important book offers vital instruction and searing reminders of what remains possible.” —Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard Law School

"The lawless Milliken decision was a turning point in American history. It stopped rapid progress toward an integrated society and gave us the segregated, polarized nation we have today. Finally, here is a brilliant analysis of this monumental case, set in a richly compelling historical context, by a leading constitutional scholar." —Myron Orfield, Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Minnesota Law School

“In this powerful and eloquent book, Michelle Adams reveals the history of how the Supreme Court undermined the promise of Brown v. Board of Education in a case from the author’s hometown: Detroit. Essential reading for all who care about equality in education.” —Mary L. Dudziak, author of Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey

"Riveting . . . Adams’s meticulous recapping of the NAACP’s trial arguments serves as a disturbing window onto how Northern states created and maintained segregation . . . Rich in detail yet sprawling in scope, this shouldn’t be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"In this comprehensive and well-documented history, legal scholar and Detroit native Adams brings the issues and people surrounding the case to life and explains its ongoing impact." —Booklist

From the Publisher

2024-10-25
Legal examination of the retrenchment that followed theBrown v. Board desegregation ruling.

Can there be desegregation in schooling without desegregation in housing, employment, and other aspects of society? Legal scholar Adams examines the Supreme Court’s 1974 rulings in theMilliken v. Bradley case, an outgrowth of lawsuits concerning Detroit public schools. A commentary on and reversal ofBrown v. Board of Education, those rulings forged a distinction between de facto and de jure segregation: If Black people lived together in one community and white people lived together in another, wasn’t that just the way they chose to be, in that “the racial cast of Detroit’s neighborhoods was entirely voluntary?” Disingenuously, the Supreme Court, already beginning to drift rightward, answered yes, overlooking an observation from a decade earlier on the part of Lyndon Johnson: “Employment is often dependent on education, education on neighborhood schools and housing, housing on income, and income on employment.” Notes Adams, Justice Stephen Breyer opined years after the fact thatBrown was exemplary of a better society in which we all lived together, but inMilliken, its preceding legal contests, played out in Detroit over years in the 1960s and early 1970s, presupposed that white people and Black people lived in separate neighborhoods by choice. The district court saw it differently: Whereas, as Adams notes, layer on layer of covenants kept Black people in the city but encouraged white flight to the suburbs, busing and other efforts to desegregate the schools were in force until the Supreme Court stepped in. In Adams’ view, closing this well-written and well-argued study, the court’s decision effectively upheld segregation and undidBrown, and the racial inequalities in public schooling continue unabated today.

Nuanced critique of a judicial ruling that, by design or not, upholds separation and supremacism.

Kirkus Reviews