CBH Talk | The Battle for School Integration in the North
In 1974, two decades after Brown v. Board of Education, another Supreme Court decision – Milliken v. Bradley - effectively brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, shattering 20 years of progress towards equal education for all. The lawsuit, filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People against Michigan Governor Milliken, challenged racial segregation in Detroit public schools which were over 70% Black at the time. The NAACP’s defeat codified Northern school segregation and continues to impact our country today.
Esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams has written the definitive history of this epic case in her new book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. Adams, who served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court, offers a disturbing window into a widely overlooked turning point in American history. Her narrative of legal betrayal fundamentally changes our understanding of the history of civil rights in America and explains why issues like affirmative action remain political battlegrounds today. Adams discusses the history and its ongoing impact in a conversation led by Aaron Robertson, author of The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America.
Participants
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 of the United States 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 writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and other publications. She was born and grew up in Detroit.
Aaron Robertson is a writer, an editor, and a translator of Italian literature. His nonfiction debut, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2024, a Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2024, one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and one of the New York Public Library’s 10 Best Books of 2024. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was short-listed for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, and in 2021 he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and n+1, among other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Michelle Adams photo by Scott C. Soderberg, Michigan Photography. Aaron Robertson photo by Noah Loof.
co-sponsored by the New York chapter of the American Constitution Society
