CNN
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If you ask someone to name the Supreme Court’s single greatest moment, many will cite the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. That landmark ruling, which unanimously found that the racial segregation of students in public schools was unconstitutional, is considered a turning point in American history.
But 70 years after the Court ordered public schools to desegregate at “all deliberate speed,” many public schools in America remain racially separate and unequal. And this racial isolation is deepening. Racial segregation has increased 64% since 1988 in the nation’s 100 largest school districts, according to a 2024 study from Stanford University and the University of Southern California.
How did this happen? The reasons are complex, but according to a provocative new book, much of the blame can be placed on another Supreme Court ruling that few like to talk about: The 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision.
In “The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North,” author Michelle Adams argues that contemporary American schools are shaped more by Milliken than by Brown. What one Supreme Court gave in Brown, another took away in Milliken, leaving us with the separate but unequal public school system that we have today, she says. Four of the five justices in the Milliken majority were appointed by President Richard Nixon, a Republican, reflecting the court’s shift to the right since its Brown decision.
“Milliken v. Bradley is where the promise of Brown v. Board of Education ended,” Adams writes in her book.
The Milliken decision limited the reach of Brown and made it meaningless in many Northern cities, Adams says. In the South, it was easier for the courts to order the desegregation of schools because segregation was “state sponsored” or codified into law. Racial segregation in Northern schools was not as overt, she says.
Many Northern cities had laws that banned school segregation, but racist housing practices and “White flight” — White parents fleeing cities for the suburbs to enroll their children in heavily White public schools — led to the spread of underfunded city school districts that were virtually all-Black or Latino.
The High Court’s 5-4 decision overturned a ruling by a federal judge who had ordered the desegregation of Detroit’s public schools several years earlier. In 1972 US District Judge Stephen J. Roth ordered students in Detroit’s largely White suburban schools to participate in a sweeping “metropolitan plan” to integrate the city’s mostly Black public schools — in part through a busing plan that required that Black and white students equally share the burden of desegregation. Roth’s plan removed the “White flight” escape hatch for White parents.
Many White parents objected, previewing arguments that would later be used in other anti-integration school campaigns. They said they were against “busing” kids to public schools in other neighborhoods.
“Labeling the issue ‘busing’ rather than desegregation was a key move, one the national media now adopted and amplified,” Adams writes. “It allowed Whites to oppose integration without appearing to be openly racist.”
In “Containment,” Adams recounts how a crack team of NAACP lawyers convinced Roth during 41 days of testimony that racial segregation in Detroit was not accidental. It was caused by state and federal policy to “contain” Detroit’s Black students as if they and their families “were viewed not just as harm-causing agents, but as contagions to be quarantined and avoided at all costs.”
In the Supreme Court opinion that struck down Roth’s decision, the majority concluded that desegregation, “in the sense of dismantling a dual school system,” did not require “any particular racial balance in each ‘school, grade or classroom.’ ”
And Justice Thurgood Marshall, who as a lawyer had successfully argued the Brown case, was left to lament in his dissent, “for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other.”
The impact of the Milliken decision was almost immediate. By the mid-1970s, Detroit had lost at least 51,000 White students. And by 2021, a study found that Detroit was the most segregated city in America. In recent decades the nation’s public schools have been steadily resegregating.
At times, Adams’ book reads like a legal thriller, with striking characters and dramatic courtroom moments. One of the book’s most intriguing characters is Roth, a judge who used racial slurs in private and initially viewed NAACP lawyers as outside agitators. Yet he ignored the hatred he received from parts of Detroit’s White community — one bumper sticker from that era declared, “Roth is a four-letter word” — to devise a plan to live up to the promise of the Brown decision. Roth died of a heart attack just weeks before the high court struck down his ruling.
The Milliken case and its aftermath are also personal for Adams. She is a native of Detroit. Her father was one of only two Black men to graduate from the Detroit College of Law in 1957, and although they lived in the city her parents enrolled her in a small, private White school in the Detroit suburbs because they thought it would provide her with additional educational resources.
Adams talked to CNN about her book. Her comments were edited for brevity and clarity.
You say in your book that Milliken is where the promise of Brown versus Board of Education ended. Some may say that sounds like hyperbole. Why write that?
Imagine it’s 1970, and we’ve got Brown, and we’ve got Brown II, which came in 1955, which basically says, (desegregate) “at all deliberate speed.” And so people are trying to figure out what that means. But in 1970, right around when this case (Milliken) gets going, the Supreme Court hadn’t spoken to desegregation in the North at all. And the question was, is Brown going to be a nationwide rule, or was it just going to be of regional significance?
And the promise of Brown wasn’t just that Black children were going to be able to go to White schools. It was that we were going to have an opportunity to move forward as a nation, because children would be educated together.
And so we would be dealing with both the fact that Black children hadn’t had equal educational opportunity, but also hopefully we’d start breaking down some of the kinds of thought processes that cause White supremacy. One of the things we know is that when you separate people and keep them apart, it tends to increase stereotypes and hostilities. And when people get to know each other, it tends to decrease that.
The promise of Brown was the possibility that when you start integration in the earliest ages, our children as a nation would grow up together. And so the big question in 1970, when the case in Detroit starts, is Brown going to go North? And ultimately, the Supreme Court says, no. Milliken really is a nationwide rule, and it really does end the promise of Brown, because Brown promised an opportunity for us to put Jim Crow back in the bottle.
You quoted that dissent from Thurgood Marshall, where he said unless our children learn to go to school together, there is little hope that our nation will learn how to live together. Why did you highlight that quote?
Thurgood Marshall’s name is basically synonymous with school desegregation. He’s on the Supreme Court, and he’s in the minority of this 5-4 decision. When people hear Thurgood Marshall, they think this guy knows what he’s talking about. And so when he says something like that, it carries a lot of weight. The other reason is because his dissent in that case (Milliken) was really prescient.
You quote President Nixon, who opposed busing to create integrated schools by saying — and I’m paraphrasing — you can’t stop discrimination against one group by starting discrimination against another. I heard that rationale repeated by Chief Justice John Roberts in a 2007 decision when the Court’s conservative majority ruled that a public school district in Seattle couldn’t consider race, even for the purpose of integration. This prompted Roberts to write, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
What I think about that (Roberts) line is that it’s intuitively so common-sensical. But that statement suggests that anything that we do to try to make up for what happened in the past … is a form of discrimination in of itself.
Instead of saying that, maybe what we should say is that the way for us to be a functioning, multiracial democracy is to have our children learn together from the earliest grades. The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to start bringing our children together across class and across race. That’s the way I would phrase that. We need to look back to help us look forward.
You wrote about the anger of White parents in Detroit who used threats of violence and vandalism to prevent their kids from attending school with Black children. It made me think of the photos from the South that showed enraged parents reacting to school integration. Why did the prospect of having their children sit next to Black kids in classrooms provoke such fury?
One of the things that we need to get away from is the idea that what was happening in North and the South was different, and that people’s mindsets were different. When you stigmatize a group, and when you associate a group (Black people) with being Other, being dirty, being contaminated, being poor and being oversexualized — when you put all of those things on a group, then the question becomes: Well, do want your kids to go to school with those kids?
How would you tell White parents that sending their children to racially segregated schools hurts their kids? What would you say?
What I would say is, what do we mean when we say, “a good school?” All parents want their children to go to good schools. All parents want their children to be educated to the highest level that their children’s talent will take them.
If we are living in a multiracial society, is it possible for students to be adequately prepared in a mono-racial environment to compete economically and interpersonally in a workplace? I think that in order to prepare our children to not just be your best self, but to be able to compete, move and max out their talents, they need to be able to be effective in a multiracial workplace, because that’s the world that we live in. So, I would say to a parent that I wonder if a good school is all one race — in a society that’s not.
What do you say to Black parents who say I am tired of chasing White people? We move into their neighborhoods and send their children to their schools and then they leave. The best thing we can do is to make sure our schools have equal resources and that we have teachers who see our kids as human beings.
What I would say is, I hear you. The first thing I’d say is, I’m not going to lecture or second-guess choices that Black parents make. But because of racial economic segregation, Black students in many situations don’t just need equal money, they need more. And so the question becomes: Is it true that we’re going to get all the benefits we need to compete if our children are raised solely in Black-only schools?
Judge Roth is a fascinating character in the book. What enabled him to change his views?
There are a ton of interesting characters in the book, but he probably changes the most. He does start out at the beginning of the lawsuit being very hostile to the plaintiff’s (NAACP) claims. Roth is a Hungarian immigrant, grows up in Flint, Michigan, puts himself through college and law school. He’s a man of his time. He thinks that the reason why Blacks live in Black neighborhoods and Polish people live in Polish neighborhoods is just because they want to live with people who are like themselves.
What changes him is that he has an open mind. He’s open to being persuaded by something called facts. And day after day after day, he listens, and he learns, and he comes to certain kinds of realizations.
What I’m trying to suggest is not that Black people need White people next to them to be able to learn. What am I trying to suggest is that there were a cohort of Black folks in the 1960s and early 70s who were passionate about school desegregation. What I want to know is why? Part of what they thought is that green followed White (the belief that the only chance Black students get to share the equal resources allotted to White students is to attend the same schools).
This is not about chastising Black parents. It’s about stepping back and asking what kind of social polices might benefit all American children, and going back to a moment when many Black parents were passionate about school desegregation.
What impact did it have on you to attend this private integrated school outside of Detroit as a girl?
I had two feet in different places. One of my feet was firmly in the Black community. Everybody I knew went to an HBCU (historically Black college or university). Both of my parents attended Howard (University) for a time, so I grew up around a lot of Black professionals: doctors, lawyers, school administrators. It was a very strong, incredibly positive, idyllic Black community.
And then during the school days, I took a long bus ride, and I was in a suburban area that was predominately White. It affected the person that I have become. All of it (the Milliken case) was happening while I’m a kid. But I didn’t know it, because I wasn’t going to Detroit public schools.
Was it difficult for you to be one of the few Black kids in this White school? Did you get abuse from students and teachers? A lot of Black parents who opposed integration said they didn’t want their kids to go through anything like that.
I was not bullied. I was not called names. I was not belittled. I was not made to feel like Other, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that the school was founded by folks who were fleeing Nazi tyranny in Germany and so the whole vibe of the school — they were progressive schools in Germany that the Hitler regime closed down — was very much against authoritarianism. They were progressive, and so that worldview permeated the school and came from the top.
It also attracted parents who also shared some of those same values. I was less likely to be exposed to children who had been raised in households where it was viewed as okay to treat a Black child differently. I only went to that school, so I kind of thought that’s the way (all) schools were. And then, of course, I got older and realized that that was a unique experience.
You’re still passionate about integration, a term that people don’t even really use anymore (Adams wrote a 2006 paper on something she calls “radical integration”). How do you not give into despair when you look at where the country is today, and why is integration so important to you?
If I give into despair now, then I would not be honoring my ancestors. I think about my parents and what they went through. I also think about historical figures like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. I think about all the people who made sacrifices to make it possible for me to be sitting here talking to you today.
And on one level or another, all these people agreed about one thing—that this country could change. I still believe that within our country and within our Constitution are the seeds of the possibility of a true democracy. And at the end of the day, whether you want to call it integration or some other word, what we’re really talking about is democracy.
John Blake is a CNN senior writer and author of the award-winning memoir, “More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.”
