The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North with Michelle Adams

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.

Please join Adams and Professor Rick Banks in a timely conversation about this legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise. This event is cosponsored by the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, the Stanford Center for Law & History, the Educational Opportunity Project, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, and the Institute for Advancing Just Societies.