The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. 528 pages. $35.00 hardcover.
"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, New York Times Book Review.
This book relates Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs and the associated struggle for desegregation in the North. In The Containment, Michelle Adams, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, tells the history of the attempts to integrate Detroit schools, and the problems that followed when this effort collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. The book includes brief bios of the activists who tried to help Detroit's students during this period of riots, Black power, and white flight. In 1974, Federal District Judge Stephen Roth ruled that integration was not possible within the city's boundaries and ordered a new plan to include 53 of the 85 surrounding, mostly white, school districts.
This metropolitan desegregation remedy could have remade the future direction of racial justice. Instead, the US Supreme Court on July 25, 1974 overruled the lower courts in ruling that the federal courts "could not impose a multidistrict, area-wide remedy upon local districts in the absence of any evidence those districts committed acts causing racial discrimination." The decision seriously impeded the struggle for forced desegregation both in Michigan and throughout the North, and limited the scope of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students unconstitutional.
Read the State Bar of Michigan's Michigan Legal Milestones historical article.
