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Book

The containment : Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the battle for racial justice in the North

Call Numbers

  • H 344.0798 A215 (CEN)
  • 344.0798 A215 (CEN, EAS, OSH)

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Edition

First edition.

Publication Information

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025.

Physical Description

xxviii, 494 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, map ; 24 cm

Summary

"A history of post-Brown school desegregation in Detroit, with a focus on Milliken v. Bradley"--

"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." --

Contents

  • Part I: "Soul Force"
  • Clash in Midtown
  • Sympathy, knowledge, and the truth
  • Slay the dragon
  • The housing-schools nexus
  • Soul force
  • Democracy's finest hour
  • Money is power and it works
  • Right thing to lose
  • Part II: The containment
  • Up for grabs
  • Taking on Northern Jim Crow
  • Another brick in the wall
  • Garbage in, garbage out
  • Ten buses
  • Accident of geography
  • Something we comfortably tell ourselves
  • Going for metro
  • Part III: Milliken v. Bradley
  • Now more than ever
  • Farewell to the Warren Court
  • A ticking clock
  • Milliken v. Bradley
  • The story
  • Fences
  • The consequences
  • "True integration".

Subjects