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

ISBN: 0374250421

Author: Adams, Michelle

Condition: New

Winner of the MAAH Stone Book AwardWinner of the 2025 Avern Cohn AwardWinner of the 2026 Hillman Prize for Book JournalismHonorable Mention, 2026 ABA Silver Gavel AwardA New York Times Notable Book of 2025,A New Yorker Best Book of 2025 selectionA Library of Michigan Notable Book of 2026A Christian Science Monitor 25 Best Books of 2025The epic story of Detroits 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 movements 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 Roths 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 Detroits first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of todays backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the countrys promise.