THE CONTAINMENT

Legal examination of the retrenchment that followed the Brown 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 the Milliken v. Bradley case, an outgrowth of lawsuits concerning Detroit public schools. A commentary on and reversal of Brown 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 that Brown was exemplary of a better society in which we all lived together, but in Milliken, 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 undid Brown, 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.