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Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
by Michelle Adams
The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs―and the defeat of desegregation in the North.
In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement's struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?
In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools―and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight―and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth's landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The "metropolitan remedy" could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate―and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.
Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures―including Detroit's first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today's backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise.
"The overwhelming evidence convinced the skeptical Roth, who ordered a metropolitan integration plan that would have incorporated school districts from Detroit and its predominantly white suburbs, only for the Supreme Court to scrap Roth's plan as an unacceptable violation of school district autonomy, a decision that marked the Burger Court's turn away from the pro–racial justice leanings of the Warren Court. Rich in detail yet sprawling in scope, this shouldn't be missed." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this comprehensive and well-documented history, legal scholar and Detroit native Adams brings the issues and people surrounding the case to life and explains its ongoing impact." ―Booklist
This information about The Containment was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration's Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
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Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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