On December 4, 2006, I attended an oral argument at the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., as a newly admitted member of the Supreme Court Bar. It was my first visit to the high court, but I wasn’t a civilian. As a civil rights lawyer and constitutional law professor for more than ten years, I, along with another professor, had submitted an “amicus curiae” brief in a school desegregation case that would be heard that day. (“Amicus curiae” means “friend of the court.”) Writing on behalf of the National Parent Teacher Association, we argued that a racially integrated education was an absolute imperative for all children.
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“In a multiracial setting, all children are provided the best opportunity to master necessary academic skills, to engage in critical thinking, to achieve comfort with members of other races and ethnic groups, and to aspire to their highest potential,” the brief confidently asserted. With my work for the NPTA complete, I felt a sense of satisfaction. I had played a small role in what promised to be one of the most important cases of my generation. The case would answer a core constitutional question: What does Brown v. Board of Education really mean? Did Brown just ban the kind of “dual” school systems that were once ubiquitous in the South: overtly racially separate schools for whites and blacks? Or did Brown stand for the proposition that, given the myriad harms of segregation, Americans of different races should be educated together rather than apart, even if it meant assigning students on the basis of race to accomplish that goal?
For me, attending this oral argument was not just professional—it was deeply personal. My father, who had died several years before that December morning, had been a criminal defense lawyer in Detroit, Michigan, for more than forty years. He was one of only two black men to graduate from the Detroit College of Law in 1957. That he became a lawyer at that time bordered on the astonishing. A full ten years later, American law schools were producing only about two hundred black lawyers annually. In 1989—when I graduated from law school—American law schools weren’t exactly minting black lawyers (in the year in which I graduated there were only about 6,300 black students enrolled in law school nationwide). So the fact that I had become a lawyer, just as he had, was a big deal. But it was an even bigger deal that I was now a law professor sitting in the Supreme Court.
More than any other single case, Milliken v. Bradley is where the promise of Brown v. Board of Education ended.
To me, my father was a larger-than-life figure. I remember him once lying on a counsel table in open court to illustrate a point during one of my frequent trips downtown to watch him work. “Everyone deserves a good defense,” he often told me. And he provided it. My father defended several generations of Detroiters in the city’s bustling criminal courts. He was a well-respected lawyer, a pillar of the community. But as I sat in the high court waiting for argument to begin in a case in which I had submitted a brief, it was clear that I had opportunities that simply weren’t available to him. He would have been bursting with pride.
The majesty of the setting matched the importance of the case to be heard that day: Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. Parents Involved was about two public school districts: one in Seattle, Washington, and one in Louisville, Kentucky. Both school districts had used race to achieve more racial integration in their respective school systems, and now that policy was under attack.
The trouble was what had happened to the interpretation of Brown in the decades since the decision—and the two diverging ways that the ruling was now understood. The first understanding emphasized the harm that segregation created; Brown said “separate is inherently unequal” and that racial separation “generates a feeling of inferiority…unlikely ever to be undone.” Such a harm created a duty on school authorities to desegregate. Following this view, Seattle and Louisville considered race when assigning students to schools because they believed they had a duty to fulfill Brown’s promise of integration.
But in the second understanding of Brown, a primary point of the ruling was that it was unconstitutional for school districts to assign students to schools on the basis of race. Period. On this view, the harm was created when the government classified students on the basis of race. In this view of Brown, the school districts could not consider race even in the service of integration. Now the Supreme Court and its relatively new chief justice, John Roberts, would have to resolve this question: Could school districts use race to reduce segregation in the schools, or did the decision actually limit their ability to intervene along racial lines? The chief justice distilled the issue: “The parties…debate which side is more faithful to the heritage of Brown.” So the question was: Which vision of Brown—perhaps the most important constitutional case of the twentieth century—would prevail?
So there I sat, pen poised, head up, attention rapt. The clock struck ten.
The justices appeared from behind the drapes and moved quickly to their seats. The lawyer representing the group of children who had challenged Seattle’s school assignment plan began: “Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court.” Almost immediately Justice Anthony Kennedy asked a hypothetical question. The justice invited the lawyer to imagine that school authorities were attempting to determine where to build a new school. Kennedy: “There are three sites. One of them would be all one race. Site two would be all the other race. Site three would be a diversity of races. Can the school board with… the intent to have diversity pick site number 3?”
The lawyer didn’t answer the question directly: “Justice Kennedy, I think the answer turns on the reason that the schools have the racial compositions that they do.” The racial makeup of the three sites differed because of “residential housing segregation” and “the board wants to have diversity,” the justice clarified. The lawyer soon explained that in his view, seeking racial diversity in schools should not be allowed “absent past discrimination.” The response implied that “residential housing segregation” and past discrimination were discordant, unrelated phenomena. But if that were the case, why were the areas around the new school sites—in Justice Kennedy’s words—“segregated” in the first place?
Later, Justice Antonin Scalia interrupted counsel for the school districts to offer his view of the correct definition of “segregation”: “You refer to some of the schools as segregated…That’s not what I understand by segregated…I mean, you know, if you belong to a country club that…has 15 percent black members, I would not consider that a segregated country club.” The justice continued: “What you are complaining about is not segregation in any reasonable sense of the word. You’re complaining about a lack of racial balance.” “We are not complaining about segregation resulting from purposeful discrimination,” the lawyer conceded. “That’s the only meaning of segregation” was Justice Scalia’s curt reply. All I could think was: The school districts are going to lose this case. Of that I was sure.
Justice Scalia’s comments suggested that “segregation” had a specific, technical meaning. From this perspective, the only definition of “segregation” was racial separation directly traceable to purposeful governmental discrimination. Everything else was mere “racial imbalance,” which was entirely unobjectionable under constitutional law. Lack of “racial balance” certainly couldn’t justify the school districts’ use of racial classifications. The justice’s remarks held two further assumptions. The first was that “segregation,” if it still existed, was rare and rapidly vanishing. The country club scenario was far more likely. The second was that the cause of the remaining racial separation—the racial imbalance—so readily observable in places like schools and neighborhoods was unknown and perhaps unknowable. After all, who knew why there was an 85–15 racial split at the country club? It was a mystery, one that perhaps only Sherlock Holmes could solve.
Justice Kennedy’s hypothetical question suggested that Parents Involved, a school segregation case, also raised significant questions about housing segregation. It did. The core of the question in Parents Involved was whether school authorities—cognizant of background conditions that created racially segregated schools such as residential segregation—could take race- based action to overcome those conditions. But the school districts ran right into a wall at the Supreme Court: What you are complaining about is not segregation in any reasonable sense of the word.
In subsequent years, the court would set the cause of racial justice back still further, curtailing the enforcement of voting rights and the use of affirmative action in university admissions. The Brown court’s use of the Fourteenth Amendment and its guarantee of “equal protection” to promote equality would be turned on its head. After attending the Parents Involved oral argument, I wasn’t surprised.
As I reflected on Justice Scalia’s comments in Parents Involved, I thought of an earlier school segregation case from 1974 called Milliken v. Bradley. It arose in my hometown of Detroit. Every year, I’d teach the case in my constitutional law class and attempt to explain why it was so incredibly important. And every year I failed. I’d explain that the Detroit branch of the NAACP brought a lawsuit against state and local school officials alleging that—as a result of official government policy—students in the Detroit public schools were segregated on the basis of race.
The case was a triumph for the NAACP; it proved that Detroit’s schools were unconstitutionally segregated. It won its case against the state and local government. Because of Brown, the victory meant that black students in Detroit were entitled to attend integrated schools. But there was a big problem: there weren’t enough white students in Detroit to have meaningful integration, and a Detroit-only integration plan would further incentivize whites to leave the city. Recognizing these difficulties, the trial judge in the case ordered that students in nearby suburban—and largely white—school districts be included in a sweeping plan to integrate Detroit’s schools. The trial judge believed that what came to be called a “metropolitan remedy” was both appropriate and required. In this, Brown was his guiding light.
I had special feelings for Detroit, but in many ways the city wasn’t unique. The racial composition of the Detroit metropolitan area was distressingly familiar. There was even a name for the phenomenon: “chocolate city, vanilla suburbs.” The term was popularized by “Chocolate City,” a 1975 hit song by the legendary funk band Parliament. The song celebrated the shifting demographics of the nation’s capital—“God bless [Washington, D.C.] and its vanilla suburbs”—and “name-checked” several other majority black cities. And, just as the urban-suburban racial divide that characterized the Detroit metropolitan area was prototypical, its causes were equally ubiquitous: racially restrictive covenants, redlining, racial steering, blockbusting, mortgage lending discrimination, racially segregated public housing, urban renewal, exclusionary zoning, white violence. For these reasons, it was hard to overstate the importance of the trial judge’s ruling. If metropolitan “cross-district” desegregation could be ordered in Detroit, it conceivably could be ordered anywhere.
But when the Milliken case reached the Supreme Court, the judge’s plan was overturned. In a 5–4 decision, the justices ruled that the trial judge had gone too far and that suburban school districts that had not formally engaged in racial discrimination could not be included in a larger integration plan. Because of Brown, students had a right not to be confined to racially segregated schools. Due to Milliken, however, for most black students in the North, the rights protected under Brown were meaningless. Brown had been violated. Black schoolchildren had won the case. But it didn’t matter. What mattered more were the interests of the suburban school districts, and they wanted nothing to do with integrating Detroit’s schools.
Emphasizing suburban innocence, the importance of local control, and a deeply blinkered view of even the most recent history, Milliken signaled that the country’s serious efforts at school integration had come to an end. As difficult as Brown was to implement, it did change the political landscape. After Brown, the defaults shifted. Brown put southern segregationists on the defensive. Brown altered the nature of the national conversation and moved us closer to racial equality. But Milliken had exactly the opposite effect. It suggested that the default position was actually much closer to “separate but [un]equal.”
Most of the time, my students didn’t really understand why Milliken was so important, and I couldn’t communicate my complex feelings about the case. For me, Milliken also triggered something deeply personal. I was born in Detroit in 1963. Both my parents were born there as well, children of the Great Migration. Their parents, along with millions of others, came to Detroit, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and a host of other northern and western cities to escape southern Jim Crow. My grandparents (and other Detroit-bound blacks) hoped that the city’s booming auto industry would provide better opportunities for them and their children. It did. When my parents got married in 1962, my father already owned a home in southwest Detroit, one that he had paid for entirely in cash.
By the late 1960s, my parents were part of Detroit’s thriving black middle class. They were living the American dream and wanted—like so many other Americans, then as now—to move on up. But my parents knew the suburbs were effectively closed to them. That Detroit’s suburbs were off-limits for blacks was hardly a secret. Just two years before my parents married, Michigan’s mean suburban black population stood at a paltry 2.1 percent. Most white realtors wouldn’t show prospective black homebuyers listings in suburban neighborhoods. And, even if blacks somehow managed to purchase a home outside the city, the fear of white violence was real.
In June 1967, whites repeatedly attacked an interracial couple, Carado and Ruby Bailey, after they had moved into a suburban Warren, Michigan, subdivision. The event was widely reported. Several days after the move-in, the Detroit Free Press noted that “police with riot guns Tuesday night swept 200 jeering people away from a Negro home in Warren that was under siege by white demonstrators for the third consecutive night.” Several months later, someone burned a cross in the family’s front yard. By some accounts, the harassment continued for years. In 1968, a Michigan Civil Rights Commission official reported that “our experience has been that nearly all attempts by black families to move to Detroit suburbs have been met with harassment.” My parents read both of the city’s two major daily papers, the liberal-leaning Detroit Free Press (morning) and the more conservative Detroit News (evening), avidly. I don’t know for sure whether they were aware of what had happened to the Baileys. But what I do know is that they dreamed of building a home in northwest Detroit, in a community called Palmer Woods.
Home to white auto executives and industry magnates in the 1920s and 1930s, Palmer Woods was one of the most beautiful areas in the entire city. Although the neighborhood was located within Detroit, you would never know it. The community teemed with English Tudors and other early twentieth-century mansions set back on large, irregular lots. The impressive houses, windy streets, and massive trees gave the area a suburban, parklike feel. But in 1967, Palmer Woods was still almost entirely white. The color line that separated Detroit’s neighborhoods (and that between the city and the suburbs) was rigid. Ultimately, my parents bought a corner lot in the area, right off Woodward Avenue (Detroit’s “Main Street”).
But the lot where their dream home in Palmer Woods would one day be situated wasn’t easily obtained. In late 1967—and just a few months after the deadliest and most violent civil disorder of the 1960s—a white intermediary purchased the land and then assigned the deed to my parents. How my parents obtained the intermediary and what he charged for his services is unknown. But what I distinctly remember is my mother telling me that they couldn’t have bought the land without him.
1967 was an important year for my parents for another reason. Both of them had attended the city’s public schools. My father was a proud graduate of Northwestern High School; my mother attended Southwestern High. But they made a different choice for me. In the fall of 1967, they enrolled me in Roeper City and Country School, a small private school in the tony suburb of Bloomfield Hills. The precise reason for their choice has been lost in the mists of time, although the fact that Roeper was the very first private school in the state of Michigan to integrate its student body might have had something to do with it. Perhaps they were reacting to the recent civil disorder. They were likely aware that President Lyndon Johnson had established the “blue ribbon” Kerner Commission to study—even while the Detroit riot was still raging—the causes of and potential solutions for urban civil unrest. Or they might have been responding to information they gleaned from the Detroit Free Press.
In February 1967, the paper reported on a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights study concluding that the Detroit public schools were deeply racially segregated. More than 70 percent of black elementary school students in Detroit attended schools that were at least 90 percent black; 65 percent of the city’s white grade school students attended schools that were at least 90 percent white. That same report found that “school segregation…had detrimental effects on the social development of the children involved.”
At the core of the desegregation story is both reactionary white rage…and the possibility that we might as a nation transcend it.
In September, the Detroit Free Press reported on a recent study of black Detroiters that might have shed some light on my parents’ decision-making process. The study suggested that, notwithstanding high levels of discontent, most black Detroiters still continued to believe in the American dream. A key finding was that black Detroiters were strong supporters of education. They were optimistic about their children’s “chances of reaching professional or technical career levels.” The question was whether this objective could be obtained in Detroit’s schools. Black Detroiters’ hope for their children “throws considerable stress upon the whole urban system and upon the educational resources that are expected to create such mobility,” the study warned. Perhaps this was why, only very recently out of diapers, I found myself attending a distant suburban private school in the fall of 1967.
Growing up, I didn’t know how I’d come to call Palmer Woods home. Nor was I aware of the changes gripping the Detroit public schools. The school bus held no negative connotations for me. I rode the bus to the predominantly white school every day for nearly fourteen years—beginning at the age of three. The Roeper School was founded by noted progressive educators George and Annemarie Roeper, who had come to the United States in the late 1930s as refugees fleeing the Nazi regime (Annemarie was Jewish). I doubt the irony of the fact that I attended a private school located in the suburbs where I likely could not have enrolled in public school—because of residential segregation—was lost on my parents.
Although I was one of few black children, I felt at home. Roeper is where I grew up. The teachers and administrators knew me and my parents well. They not only cared about my education, but they genuinely believed I had something vital and unique to contribute to the world. But as I matured, I began to ask questions. Why were there so few black children at Roeper or on any of the opposing sports teams we played? Why were there so few black families in my classmates’ suburban neighborhoods? In the city of Detroit and in the Jeffries housing projects, the public housing development where I frequently visited my beloved grandaunt Melinda, there were plenty of black families. I wondered why.
I graduated from high school in 1981. Uncharacteristically, my father cried as he and my mother dropped me off at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that fall. I’d never seen him do that before and it made a big impression. By 1981, the American auto industry was in deep trouble and the country was in recession. In Detroit, the city’s car factories were closing and its manufacturing jobs were disappearing. It felt like every time I read the daily papers or watched the local news the story was always the same: Detroit’s rising violent crime rate. Perhaps this explained my father’s tears as we said our goodbyes. He had good reason to fear that I might not ever return to the city. Thousands of others had made that choice. In 1950, Detroit was the nation’s fifth-largest city with a population of more than 1.8 million people. By 1980, the number was just above 1.2 million and falling. My family and I had gained tremendously from living in Detroit, and we lost something of incalculable value as the city declined. I take great pride in my parents’ accomplishments and in the community from which we hailed. But, even at eighteen, this pride was tinged with a sense of loss.
And so every time I taught Milliken, I looked at my poorly drawn map of Michigan on the board and my thoughts wandered back to my childhood. Images flooded my mind: black skeet shooters, the Eastern Market, Dutch Girl doughnuts, Hudson’s Thanksgiving Day parade on Woodward Avenue, the hair salon on Livernois Avenue, rhubarb bushes and massive sunflowers on city lots, black milkmen, the pea-green Cadillac in which my father taught me to drive. I smelled the scent of my grandfather’s sweet pipe smoke and my grandmother’s ripe green switches plucked clean for when I misbehaved. I heard Stevie Wonder’s funky dance tune, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’,” and my grandmother singing Bible verses. The laughter of my family and my parents’ friends—black lawyers, judges, doctors, nurses, schoolteachers, and administrators, with some well-earned money in their pockets and a job to go to on Monday morning—rang in my ears. When my students raised their hands and asked their questions about Milliken, I could never really explain why the case was so important. But it was and it still is: more than any other single case, Milliken v. Bradley is where the promise of Brown v. Board of Education ended.
During the Jim Crow era, black children were confined to all-black schools. In 1954, Brown said that kind of overt discrimination was unconstitutional. Then, the second Brown case, decided in 1955, and a handful of crucial follow-on cases decided several years later, actually enforced that right. Finally, black children would be treated as full and equal citizens of the United States. Brown and its progeny provided a meaningful remedy for black children who had experienced grievous mistreatment for generations at the hands of the state: desegregation.
Today, desegregation is perceived largely as a southern phenomenon—the Brown cases concerned southern and border states—that failed. Americans’ collective memory is that we tried to desegregate in the South and it didn’t work; perhaps it should never even have been tried. It is true that many whites were extraordinarily hostile to desegregation because it meant exactly that: destroying segregation. Segregation had always been about containment; about keeping blacks in their (lower) place—educational, residential, physical, occupational, social, psychological. But now, blacks were appearing in places they weren’t supposed to be, such as in white public schools. Whites attempted to stop this by attacking black children, particularly the early desegregation pioneers like Elizabeth Eckford and the rest of the Little Rock Nine. Everyone knows (or they should) that whites engaged in grotesque acts of harassment and violence in an effort to stop black students from breaking the color line. These were defensive, pro-segregation moves.
But history has more than one story to tell. What most Americans don’t know is that school desegregation as a social policy was a resounding success for both black and white students. First, desegregation shifted important educational resources to black students that had long been denied; in effect, it was a very effective form of wealth and social capital redistribution. Second, by requiring that blacks and whites be educated together starting in the earliest grades, desegregation helped destroy the deeply embedded cultural belief system that underpinned those unspeakable acts at Central High and elsewhere: white supremacy. Viewed from this perspective, the one-two punch of the Brown remedy—desegregation—was actually quite radical. At the core of the desegregation story is both reactionary white rage—Little Rock—and the possibility that we might as a nation transcend it. This was the promise of Brown.
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Excerpted from The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North by Michelle Adams. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a division of Macmillan, Inc. Copyright © 2025 by Michelle Adams. All rights reserved.
