The righteous, reforming passion of the civil rights era suffuses Michelle Adams’s The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. But beneath the University of Michigan constitutional law professor’s zeal, the reader can’t help perceiving how unexamined and sometimes simplistic her fundamental assumptions are. Consequently, after closing this painstakingly argued tome, one almost inevitably thinks past its conclusion—pondering, beyond the particular failure of the civil rights movement that Adams laments, the radical way that movement changed American society not only for the better but also for the worse.
The Containment tells the story of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision against school busing in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), from its beginnings as a district court case in 1970 to its epilogue in the high court’s Milliken II ruling in 1977. Adams sets the stage with a fiery 1967 debate at the Detroit Board of Education about how to reform the city’s awful public schools, which had been majority black since 1963. Asking why black pupils were disproportionally failing and dropping out, Albert B. Cleage, Jr., pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna and an admirer of Malcolm X, highlighted white teachers and principals as the problem. They systematically destroy black kids’ “self-image and racial pride,” making them feel intellectually inferior and sapping their motivation. The last thing these kids need is more integration. What they need is community control of their schools, with black parents overseeing the hiring and firing of black teachers and vetting the curriculum, textbooks, and discipline. This prescription was part of Cleage’s larger vision of a black “nation within a nation,” in which blacks would own and patronize their own businesses, professional services, and farms, set their own goals, and forge their own culture.
Hotly opposing Cleage’s black nationalism was the civil rights orthodoxy backed by the board’s future president, Abraham Zwerdling, a white labor lawyer and longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) member. He and his liberal board allies espoused the argument underlying the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, which held—based on psychologist Kenneth Clark’s flimsy study of black kids’ preferences for white dolls over black ones—that segregation, by separating black children from their white peers, did them deep emotional harm, generating “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Separate schools, therefore, were inherently, unconstitutionally unequal, and integration was the sine qua non for black educational success.
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This is only one of the several rationales supporters of integrated schools cite over the course of this book, and Adams invokes them all interchangeably. Another is economic: integrated schools equalize resources, so black kids don’t get stuck in crumbling buildings with over-large classes, inadequate textbooks, and underpaid and perhaps inferior teachers. Integrated schools, too, are said to be nurseries of democracy, teaching children of different races to live harmoniously together. And there is a vague, pervasive sense, articulated in the federal government’s 1966 Coleman Report (named for lead researcher James Coleman), that the superior intellectual and social capital white students supposedly bring with them will magically rub off on their black classmates, which is why integrationists stoutly oppose tracking by ability.
In a prologue, Adams sketches how her own history growing up in Detroit put her in the integrationist camp. She started school a few months after this great debate, but not in the public schools. Instead, from pre-K onward, her parents sent her by bus every day to a private school in a “tony” suburb, where she was one of a handful of black pupils, encouraged by caring teachers throughout her 14 years there.
Her childhood vignette makes clear, however, that the integrated school only partly explains her success. More important is her intact, nurturing family, with her father a “well-respected…pillar of the community” of successful black professionals and even her cozy grandparents on hand. With the suburbs effectively closed to blacks, Adams’s father thirsted to live in Detroit’s park-like neighborhood of big houses built for Roaring ’20s car executives, and he paid a white middleman to buy a lot for him in the mostly white area.
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Adams writes that her parents sent her to private school for reasons “lost in the mists of time,” but she guesses that they chose her school partly in reaction to Detroit’s recent race riot—the worst of a riotous decade—in which black mobs looted and burned 2,500 stores over five days in July 1967, killing 43 and injuring 1,100. In other words, her parents were in full middle-class flight. Clearly, they valued education and upward mobility, sought the best for their cherished daughter, and worked hard to give it to her. They also didn’t want her education impaired by the social pathology of a black underclass that was taking shape at that time. A subset of inner-city blacks, this class was defined by behavior more than by race: single-parent families, non-work, increasing dependence on an exploding welfare system, alcohol and drug abuse, and crime—something Adams’s father, a pioneering criminal defense lawyer, knew about intimately. More than making classroom progress slow, frustrating, and demotivating, this new underclass could turn a school disorderly and dangerous—conditions Adams ascribes to segregation and poverty rather than to poor early childhood nurturing.
Just a year after the riots, black Michigan legislator James Del Rio addressed the now even more urgent school-reform issue with an education bill that ingeniously merged the impulse to middle-class flight with Reverend Cleage’s black separatism. He envisioned breaking up the Detroit school district into 16 parts, each with its separate tax base and elected board. Following neighborhood lines, the districts would be segregated, but they’d be fenced as much by class as by race, giving middle-class blacks control of their own, mostly underclass-free schools. The bill failed because legislators disliked the intentional inequality of resources it would produce. As one lawmaker explained, she couldn’t support the “ghettoizing of families on the basis of socioeconomic characteristics.”
In April 1969, state legislator Coleman Young, the ex-Tuskegee airman soon to begin his historic 20-year reign as Detroit’s first black mayor, introduced a new bill that he thought would solve the school-reform issue definitively. A compromise between central control and the separatism he favored, his bill would divide Detroit schools into seven regions, each with an elected board with the usual powers but subject to the veto of a central board made up of members from each district. The current board would draw up the regions, and the existing teachers’ union contract would remain in effect.
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What happened next shows how time and chance can twist the consequences of men’s actions into patterns they neither intend nor foresee, like balls on a pool table scattered by a flubbed shot. In laying out the new districts, Board President Zwerdling and the schools superintendent pondered how to comply with two recent Supreme Court decisions that transmuted Brown’s negative ban on segregation into a positive command for integration, and right now. Their solution: to make each new region reflect the racial mix of the district as a whole, so its schools could be integrated in the future; to leave the elementary schools untouched for now; and to integrate half the high schools, affecting 9,000 of Detroit’s total pupil population of 300,000. It was, sniffed Young, a “chicken shit integration plan.”
Even so, when the scheme leaked in April 1970, a storm broke. Angry white parents demonstrated. Fights broke out between black and white high schoolers. Parents flooded into the next school board meeting, shouting and threatening to leave Detroit if the plan went through. But the board stuck to its guns and passed it.
“Were these whites all just unmitigated racists?” Adams asks. “Many were,” she replies, though she gives them credit (if that’s the right word for it) for having a self-interested economic motive as well. If integration were to spark white flight, the value of their houses—their principal asset, with an average value of $18,000 (versus $12,000 in black neighborhoods)—would plummet.
But what created the “white school premium,” as Adams dubs it? She gives the parents’ answer without fully understanding it. “We moved from the suburbs to Detroit for Redford Hi[gh],” one parent’s protest sign read. “Cooley [High School] means back to the suburbs.” Other parents echoed the sentiment, explaining that they’d bought their houses precisely so their kids could go to a particular (good, white) high school, to which they claimed their home purchase had created a vested right. The board’s plan would “destroy the concept of neighborhood high schools.”
What to make of that claim of “neighborhood”? Adams muses at the very end of the book. Especially if it’s a black neighborhood, it “could be a beautiful thing,” she allows, “a place of refuge,…camaraderie,…community,” strengthened by “racial and cultural bonds coupled with a shared sense of common purpose.” White neighborhoods, not so much—because when you’re talking about neighborhood schools, you’re talking more about exclusion than inclusion.
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But of course that’s not true. Detroit’s whites, mostly auto workers earning around $13,000 a year, were largely ethnics—Poles, Italians, Germans—who clustered in equally nurturing neighborhoods, humming with churches, parish councils, bowling leagues, baseball teams, union locals, social and political clubs, bars, and of course Parent-Teacher Associations. This is civil society, the private arena in which free citizens marry, build families, and help their children learn and succeed, passing on to them the manners and morals, the habits of the heart enforced by approval and stigma, that shape behavior much more powerfully than the law can do. They mow their lawns, tend their gardens, nurture their friendships, praise their God, vote for their councilmen, supervise their kids’ homework, and go to work, creating lives that have worth and meaning in their eyes and the eyes of their families and neighbors.
This is the stratum of American life that Alexis de Tocqueville so admired, especially since he saw it stifled at home in France, suffocated by an ever more powerful central government that usurped and controlled civil society’s functions in the name of benevolence. American federalism’s limited central government strengthened civil society, he noted approvingly, by leaving state legislatures, town meetings, and even the spontaneous cooperation of communities to solve common problems, such as a damaged roadway, by themselves. This was true self-government, he believed—true liberty—and the communal self-reliance it fostered fueled America’s resourceful enterprise.
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Who can blame Detroit whites for their anxiety about precisely what Michelle Adams’s parents feared: that among the black students who would now share their kids’ classrooms would be enough underclass pupils to curdle the learning environment and make going back and forth to school unsafe? After all, if the Coleman Report was right to think that black kids can absorb the social and intellectual capital of their white classmates, these white parents understandably feared that the influence could run the other way—that putting underclass kids in the classroom would impoverish rather than enrich their children. Their concern was about conduct, not color. So, even though the claims of blacks for inclusion are wholly just, no less so are the claims of these white Detroiters. As Isaiah Berlin famously wrote, not all ultimate values are reconcilable.
Snapped to attention by the voter outrage over the integration plan, both Michigan legislative houses passed different bills canceling the measure, leaving Governor William Milliken uncertain how to proceed. As usual, Coleman Young was more decisive. Furious that the board had turned his community control law into a baby-steps integration plan, and also blasting his colleagues who voted to undo it as “white bigots,” he forged yet another bill, sharpening his original local-control scheme by mandating eight new districts that would be drawn by anyone but the board and would send kids to their nearest school. The governor signed the bill in July 1970 and appointed commissioners to lay out the new districts. But once more the billiard balls flew astray. Although white and black voters got control of four districts each, the proportions of voters didn’t match the proportions of pupils. Six of the new districts had a majority of black students, but two of those would be run by white-elected boards, so there would be neither integration nor full community control. It was, writes Adams, “the worst of both worlds.”
In August, a fed-up NAACP sued the city and the state in federal district court, charging that Young’s new compromise was unconstitutional. By voiding the Board of Ed’s original plan and thus expressly blocking desegregation, the act was state action to deny equal protection of the laws. Because the plaintiffs asked the court only to void the measure, without any monetary damages, a judge would decide the case without a jury. And that would be Judge Stephen Roth, a hardscrabble, Hungarian-born John F. Kennedy-appointee whose open-minded management of the long case, recorded in a transcript that “reads like a novel,” Adams marvels, fills her with admiration.
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The plaintiffs’ strategy was to destroy the idea that the segregation of Detroit’s schools was an innocent phenomenon, spontaneously springing from individual private housing choices rather than from the official government action that would make it unconstitutional. These lawyers had their work cut out for them, since a federal appeals court had just ruled precisely the opposite the year before, declaring that Cincinnati’s segregated neighborhood schools were not unconstitutional, because they were the chance by-products of merely personal decisions. Not in Detroit, countered the NAACP. The residential segregation that produced that city’s school segregation was facilitated at every step by a myriad of official government actions at all levels, with malign purpose.
The NAACP lawyers piled example upon example. During the first half of the 20th century almost all new Detroit subdivisions bristled with restrictive, anti-black covenants, ultimately enforced by courts, which were state actors. That’s why the Supreme Court had declared such covenants unconstitutional in 1948. What’s more, who but government officials had purposely located new public housing projects in black areas, concentrating segregation and solidifying it in brick and mortar? As for Detroit’s real estate industry, it had long been split into two cartels, one white and one black, serving separate, segregated markets. White brokers—under license from the Michigan government—didn’t show houses to black buyers. And, for a truly concrete example, just look at Detroit’s Eight Mile Wall—a literal wall, six feet high, one foot thick, a half mile long, separating a white subdivision built in the 1940s from the adjoining black neighborhood. The fruit of a deal between the developer and the Federal Housing Authority to provide mortgage guarantees that were not available in high investment risk areas (meaning black ones), the Washington-validated wall “stigmatized and humiliated black families, just as the ‘whites only’ signs did in the South,” Adams writes.
It took a year of such argument, teetering between the ingenious and the tendentious, to persuade an initially skeptical Judge Roth. But in September 1971, he announced the first part of his ruling, accepting the NAACP’s whole scenario. Detroit schools were indeed unconstitutionally segregated, he ruled, and the school segregation was inseparable from the residential segregation that had generated it and was in turn reinforced by it. Crucially, the segregated neighborhoods resulted from a combination of private actions and public ones too, at all levels of government, from local to federal.
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How to remedy this situation, however, had become more complicated in the 14 months since the NAACP filed the suit. During the intervening spring, the Supreme Court’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) decision had ruled that in urban areas where such government actions as zoning, city planning, or urban renewal had produced segregated neighborhoods and thus separate schools, district judges had the power to redraw school zones to ensure racial balance and could order students to be bused between districts for that purpose. Even before that, white Detroiters had begun to suspect that Judge Roth might ultimately rule for the plaintiffs and order Detroit’s schools integrated. In that case, black kids would overwhelm the limited number of the city’s white schools. Parents began to raise the idea of a “metropolitan solution” that would corral the suburbs into the desegregation order too, diluting a future influx of new black pupils.
That solution took root in the judge’s mind and ripened into a June 1972 ruling that, as Adams put it, “was going to bring Brown North.” Roth would bundle some 50 nearby suburban school districts together with Detroit into his desegregation zone and bus pupils among the areas for racial balance—meaning, he said, that “no school, grade or classroom be substantially disproportionate to the overall pupil racial composition.” He’d require racial balance of the faculty too, with “affirmative action” to get the black teaching ranks up to strength. Starting in the fall, 900,000 pupils would begin the great migration.
But wait: the suburban districts had never been named in the lawsuit! How could they be roped into this new scheme? Easy, Judge Roth reasoned. As another federal district judge had pronounced in 1962, the “Constitution recognizes no governing units except the federal government and the states.” Cities, counties, school districts—these are constitutional epiphenomena, with no legal existence worth respecting. They are insubstantial emanations of the states, like foam on the waves. The state of Michigan is ultimately guilty of the misdeeds of its vassal subdivisions, and it is indeed a named defendant.
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By accepting the NAACP’s main argument that the lower court should look through the reality created by the free, personal choices of individual citizens and focus only on the reality created or licensed by government, Roth’s decision consigned to irrelevancy the realm of civil society through which citizens most directly rule themselves in their communities. As with so much of that era’s federal jurisprudence, the watchword seemed to be: where civil society once was, there the state—and only the state—shall be. At that point, citizens get turned into subjects, or as Tocqueville put it, “a timid and industrious flock of animals, with the government as its shepherd.” Even your kid is no longer an end, endowed with unalienable rights, but rather a means, offered up by an all-powerful sovereign to making equality or emanating educational capital or giving reparations.
Michigan and the city of Detroit instantly appealed Roth’s decision, and the Sixth Circuit upheld his ruling in June 1973, though one dissenter pertinently wondered how far the plaintiffs meant to go if the “metropolitan solution” didn’t work. Would they then move to bus pupils across the entire state and then into the adjoining states? In any event, since some months earlier the Fourth Circuit had ruled against Richmond, Virginia’s similar metropolitan solution, the split between the circuits meant that the case was now headed to the Supreme Court for resolution.
But the Warren Court that had presided over the rights revolution was no more. The mood of the country had changed. From the White House, President Richard Nixon pledged to “leave no stone unturned” to block busing, a stand that helped him carry 49 states to win re-election in 1972. That Election Day, Judge Roth had the first of three heart attacks, the last of which killed him a year and a half later at 66, just two weeks before the Supreme Court ruled in July 1974.
Chief Justice Warren Burger’s opinion for the 5-4 majority blew the metropolitan plan out of the water. As there had been no interdistrict violation, he ruled, there could be no interdistrict remedy. Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley’s description of Roth as “a judicial activist hell-bent on mandating social change from the bench” evidently had impressed the Chief Justice, as had the state’s argument of “white innocence,” in effect denying that whites bore any responsibility for making the ghetto. In oral argument, Burger had implied that, for the suburban districts to be included in the remedy, each one of them should have been found individually to have violated the Constitution. He apparently thought, Adams notes incredulously, that school districts were not mere bubbles on the surface of the state but rather “little mini-states.” Left afloat was only Judge Roth’s finding that the Detroit schools were unconstitutionally segregated, and how to integrate them within the confines of the city alone would be left to a new trial judge.
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Looking back on the consequences of that trial judge’s decision, ratified by the Supreme Court in Milliken II in 1977, Adams feels only despair. Indeed, that judge, recognizing how little integration he could accomplish in a district that was already three-quarters black, tried in vain to bolster his efforts by ordering the state to fund remedial education programs to help bring black students’ reading skills up to par. Today, the pupils in Detroit’s non-charter public schools, 82% black and 2% white, rank last in the nation on literacy tests. “Milliken,” writes Adams, “was where the promise of Brown ended.”
“The unspoken rationale behind Judge Roth’s order,” she sums up, “was that suburban whites had benefited from generations of public and private racial discrimination; requiring them to participate in a metropolitan desegregation plan was only fair.” That’s a sentence worth rereading to appreciate how many revealing implications it contains. It was a “benefit” to these suburbanites not to share their neighborhoods and schools with blacks, presumably because of the disorder they would bring. Citizens don’t have a right to protect themselves from disorder. This suburban generation must be made to pay for the choices of its urban predecessors. Government should remake society to make it “fair.” When you add an adjective to “justice”—such as “racial justice” in this book’s subtitle—you are talking about something other than justice.
For her part, Adams would break up the segregated neighborhoods that give rise to segregated schools, outlaw their exclusionary zoning, cram high-density apartment buildings and accessory units into those single-family residential areas, and establish programs to flood poor black families into the new units and subsidize their rents. A good neighborhood isn’t someplace you must earn your way into, she assumes, and if these poor families lack the neighborly virtues, perhaps those virtues will rub off on them, as the virtues of white students are believed to rub off on their black classmates, rather than vice versa. Neighborhoods mold neighbors, her assumption goes, rather than neighbors shaping neighborhoods. You can imagine what Adams’s parents would say to see such buildings arise in the safe, leafy neighborhood they worked so hard to secure. But to achieve her vision of equality, Adams herself seems hell-bent on stamping out the last embers of self-governing civil society.
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Yet earlier in the book she writes warmly of another way forward, one that worked. Martin Luther King, Jr., she notes, acknowledged that “law could do only so much.” Ultimately, what was needed to solve the race problem, he believed, was “a profound change of heart” among white Americans, a willingness to accept blacks as fellow men and fellow citizens in every way. That was partly what the civil rights protests he led aimed to bring about, to show white America, by the quiet dignity of the orderly marchers, that the content of their character was sterling. And the cultural change he sought ultimately did come to pass, not perfectly but substantially. Just look at the integrated middle-class neighborhoods across the country, or on a more fundamental level, 94% of Americans’ approval of interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958—a resounding vote for equality.
But this change in racial attitudes was the prelude to a larger cultural transformation —a general revolt against the authority of the established rules of order and bourgeois morality, a push for sexual freedom, for dropping out of the rat race to do your own thing (in the language of the day), for experiencing the consciousness-expanding ecstasy of drugs. This cultural revolution of the 1960s had less benign consequences for black Americans. According to the cultural revolution’s most radical strand—a strand that has only strengthened on the Left in the post-George Floyd, post-BLM era—not just rule-breaking but law-breaking was acceptable, even praiseworthy as a manly revolt against a social order that had oppressed blacks for so long. To punish criminals would then be a double layer of oppression by a system that was “to blame” for their crime. Moreover, if dropping out and sexual promiscuity and drug-taking were acceptable for the cultural vanguard, why should there be a stigma against drug use, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and dropping out onto welfare for those lower down the social scale? These cultural messages about what society should permit black Americans to do, and even support them in doing, molded the black urban underclass.
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All this ran counter to another of King’s teachings. The change of heart required for full equality, he had preached, had to occur among blacks as well as whites. The virtue he stressed, Adams reminds us, was “soul force,” his version of Mohandas Gandhi’s satyagraha, passive resistance to evil even at the cost of one’s own suffering. That was the virtue so dramatically on display when MLK’s peaceful, dignified Freedom Marchers endured the dogs and fire hoses of Southern sheriffs. It powerfully impressed white America. But that virtue isn’t enough. Passivity places your fate in someone else’s hands, leaving you only with impotent anger and resentment if you don’t get the desired result. What’s needed too are the active, enterprising virtues Protestant settlers brought to these shores in the 17th century—the self-reliance, self-control, and deferral of gratification that result from continual moral self-examination.
In the cultural maelstrom that upended so much in the ’60s and beyond, it would have been hard to preach such virtues. However understandable, it’s an American tragedy that black Protestant ministers from MLK and Albert Cleage, Jr. to Jesse Jackson, like most of their white clerical colleagues, took the more fashionable course of focusing on political action instead.
Adams ends her book with a return visit to Detroit in 2019, where, after stops at the Segregation Wall, Reverend Cleage’s church, and her old home, she sat in her rental car, looked back on Detroit and its Milliken saga, and gave way to tears “of despair, of resignation, of bitterness, of anger” at what she saw as broken promises and lost opportunities. For relief, she clicked on a Stevie Wonder song on her phone, and suddenly the memory of her parents dancing together in their living room flooded her mind.
It was the answer to her perplexity, though she didn’t quite understand it. That hardworking couple—devoted parents in a community of strivers—had found the right way forward. The answer was always there, right in front of her eyes.
