The Containment
Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the MAAH Stone Book Award
Winner of the 2025 Avern Cohn Award
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025,
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 selection
A Christian Science Monitor 25 Best Books of 2025
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this riveting debut history from Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, a 1970 school integration plan proposed by liberal members of the Detroit Board of Education kicks off a contentious legal battle that results in the Supreme Court effectively ending school desegregation in the North. The narrative features fine-grained character portraits of such key players as Nathaniel Jones (the "measured" NAACP lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court) and Stephen J. Roth (a cantankerous federal judge who ruled in the NAACP's favor) set against scenes that capture the city's tumult during the integration effort—most of it provoked by irate anti-integration white parents. Adams's meticulous recapping of the NAACP's trial arguments serves as a disturbing window onto how Northern states created and maintained segregation—for instance, by situating public housing to avoid mixed-race developments and discouraging realtors from showing Black homebuyers houses in white neighborhoods. 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.
