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-Hello and welcome to "Book Lust."
I'm your host, Nancy Pearl,
and my guest today is Michelle Adams, whose new book is
"The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court,
and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North."
Michelle, thank you so much for joining us.
I know you have a busy schedule,
and I just really wanted to talk to you about this book,
which I found absolutely fascinating and frustrating.
And it was just great. Let me just say that.
-Taking the time to read it and for having me on your show.
-Why did you want to write this particular book?
-Well, you know, I've never written a book before.
This is my first book and I'm a teacher, I'm a professor.
I teach at law school and I have taught the book --
I've taught the case about what the book is about called
Milliken versus Bradley many, many times.
And I became incredibly fascinated by it,
almost obsessed,
because that case took place in my hometown of Detroit.
And I continued to read about it and read about it.
And at some point,
I recognized there was just an incredible story there.
And that story had not been told.
And you know, it was one of these things
where if you -- you know, you write the book
that you want to read, and I wanted to read this book,
so I wrote it, I wrote it.
It's having a response with people.
People are reaching out to me
and I'm tremendously proud of it.
-We know a lot about Brown versus Board of Education
and then here is this lawsuit
that perhaps people who haven't taken year of law school class
had never even heard of.
By the time -- when this book --
when this -- when the lawsuit was taking place,
I was not living in Detroit.
I think I was actually in Ann Arbor,
but I didn't know anything about it
and it was a revelation to me.
-Well, thank you for asking me that question.
So let's take a step back if we shall and let's go back to 1970.
And it's a period of time
where there's a lot of interest in the Detroit School Board
and the school board, which had been for many years
before that run by more conservative members
at this point becomes dominated by sort of a liberal group
who are quite interested in integration.
And so ultimately there's a lot of backstory to this,
but to keep it simple,
the Detroit School Board ends up for the first time
in its history mandating a limited integration plan
that would've affected about half of the high schools
in Detroit, the Detroit public high school system.
And when this happens,
essentially all hell breaks loose.
And there's a tremendous amount of pushback.
And ultimately, the State of Michigan passes a state statute
that overturns the decision of the Detroit School Board.
And the state statute says, you know what?
Basically, you want to have an integration plan.
Sorry, you can't have it. And it's at that point
that the Detroit branch of the NAACP gets interested in this
because it sort of feel like, wow,
there's a state statute that says you can't have integration.
That's effectively saying the same thing
as mandating segregation and that feels kind of Southern.
And so they get interested and they get involved,
and ultimately they sue
and they sue both local school authorities and state
school authorities because the state, of course,
had tried to block the integration order.
And it's this case that ultimately winds its way up
into the Supreme Court called Milliken versus Bradley
that is at the heart of this book.
And so what happens in the case
is that we end up getting the case.
We have a long trial,
it's 41 days long,
and there is a federal district court judge
who's the trial judge in the case.
And he starts out being incredibly hostile
to the NAACP's claims.
He doesn't really believe
that the school district is segregated in any way.
He's just skeptical.
He thinks that these guys are making it up.
And the lawsuit quickly becomes much broader
than just this question of the state overturning
the Detroit School Board's limited integration plan.
The lawsuit ends up being about sort of the fact
that Detroit was running a separate
and unequal school system.
And so it becomes a very, very broad lawsuit
that plays out in front of this judge's --
in this judge's courtroom in Downtown Detroit.
It's 41 days.
And what's really interesting about that lawsuit
is that inside of a school lawsuit,
a lawsuit that was basically saying
the schools are segregated,
the plaintiffs, the ones who brought the case
actually had a housing case.
So there's a mini housing case within a school case.
And the housing case really tried to explain
why it was that Detroit looked the way it did,
why was there so much
residential segregation in Detroit.
And once they started having that conversation,
it ends up being in effect that in this case,
all of the ways in which Northern Jim Crow created
and maintained was on trial in Downtown Detroit.
And so this judge
who once started out being incredibly skeptical,
sort of the scales fall from his eyes,
and he begins to understand
that there's an intertwined set of governmental policies
that create both school
and residential segregation in the City of Detroit.
And he basically rules that the NAACP wins the case.
But that's just really the first part.
The next question is, will you win a case?
It's called a finding of liability by lawyers.
Then the question becomes, well, what's the remedy?
What do you do to solve the problem?
There's been a constitutional violation,
just like in the South.
The judge said that Brown was violated just like in the South.
And the question is, what do you do about it?
And this judge,
who had started out being so incredibly skeptical, says,
"Well, we're going to have
meaningful school desegregation in Detroit."
And because of the characteristics of the city,
because so many White folks had been leaving,
he says that we're going to bring
the suburban school districts into that remedy.
And so this judge who had been a big doubter,
ordered what would've been the largest desegregation,
metropolitan desegregation order in the history
of the United States.
It would've affected about 800,000 students
over 50 separate school districts.
And this ruling was actually upheld
by the intermediate federal court,
the one between the trial court and the Supreme Court.
And it that, you know, the Appellate Court said, yeah,
you know, this seems like the appropriate remedy.
The trial judge said,
"This was mandated by Brown,
we agree," gets to the United States Supreme Court, 1974,
and it gets overturned on a 5-4 decision.
And so that is the heart of the story in my book.
But what my book really tries to do is tell that story
in a broad kind of character-driven narrative way.
And I think that it's captured the attention
of a lot of readers across the country.
-Yeah, it is a page-turner, and there are heroes who appear,
Judge Roth for one
who sort of grows into his understanding
of the importance of the case.
As I was reading the book and reading about the Supreme Court,
which was decided, as you said, by one vote,
and that was Judge Scalia, I believe.
-Oh, no. Scalia is a little bit later, right?
-Oh, he was later. Okay.
-Yeah. This is what's called the Burger Court.
Justice Scalia doesn't -- -Oh, the Burger -- Okay.
-Yeah.
-I guess because it was, I think, correct me if I'm wrong,
Judge Scalia who talked about that it isn't segregation,
it isn't housing segregation, it's racial imbalance.
-So you're right, Nancy.
The very beginning of the book
begins in an oral argument in the United States Supreme Court
that I had the good fortune of attending in 2006, 2007.
It was a different case called Parents Involved
and by then Justice Scalia was sitting on the bench.
And it really opens up --
I open it up in the Supreme Court
to give the reader a sense of sort of being able to ask,
well, sort of, how do we get here?
How do we get here to the point
where the Supreme Court is saying it can't -- you know,
there's no such thing as segregation anymore,
hard to determine what caused it,
we don't know that -- those kinds of questions.
And I think those are the similar kinds of questions
that many people in the country are asked -- you know,
would ask and sort of say,
"Look at our neighborhoods, look at our schools."
You know, it's not really clear, particularly in the North
how that got created.
And so I began in the Supreme Court,
and then I worked backwards.
And I take the reader inside the oral argument.
I take the reader inside what some of the members of the court
are talking about in more recent times.
And I also introduced the reader to sort of some
of my background.
And then we begin to sort of go back in time
and we go back to 1967.
-And there were Black ministers,
members of the Black community who were not pro-integration,
who did want separate but equal schools.
-Well, there's a -- one of the first characters
you meet is a Detroit's leading Black nationalist,
a guy named Albert Cleage, who was a brilliant guy.
And you sort of get to know him
as you get to know all the characters in the book.
And one of the ways that we kind of enter our story
is Albert Cleage kind of going to the Detroit School Board
and saying, you know,
"You guys have been running a separate
and unequal school system for as long as I can remember,
and if you can't get it right, we can.
Let's take the schools back
and let's run them for the benefit of Black children."
So it was Black schools for Black children.
And so one of the things I try to do with him
and with all the other characters in the book,
and I talked to my students about this the other day,
is using a level of empathy even if we don't agree.
Ultimately, I didn't agree with his strategy,
but I wanted to empathize with all of the characters
because all of the characters in my book are Americans.
All of the characters in my book bring something different,
raise different questions, have different things to say,
contributed to the story.
And I want someone to be able to pick up this book
and step into this world
and see sort of how we got from point A to point B.
And so the other piece of this, Nancy,
is to say that some people think
that the Black community is monolithic and it's not, right?
There were tons of different ways
to think about how to achieve racial equality and many
different kinds of discussions and disagreements and arguments.
But you would expect that in a community that is diverse
and there's great sort of ideological
and political diversity in the Black community.
And I wanted to put that out there as well
so that people can really step into this moment.
-Why did you call the book "The Containment"?
-Thank you for asking that.
That is taken directly from the lawsuit.
One of the things that they did at the trial court level,
and we talk a lot in the book about the lawyers
and the lawyers' choices,
but in a way that I think is quite accessible,
is they discovered through their research
and through the trial
that they put on every day in Judge Roth's courtroom,
that in fact what had happened in terms of the City of Detroit
now separate and apart from the schools,
but that in fact there'd been a series
of interlocking governmental policies
that had been going on for a very long time
that contained Black folks within certain sections
of the City of Detroit.
And so this notion of the containment
was an important part of the case.
And so one of the things they were trying to do,
remember we talked about the idea of there being
a housing case within a school case,
is they were trying to show
that Black folks weren't able to make real choices about
where they were going to live.
And so once the school board decided
they were going to use a neighborhood school rule,
they were essentially incorporating
the underlying residential segregation into the schools.
And so the containment was created by a bunch
of different kinds of factors and characters and actors.
It was racially restrictive covenants.
It was intentionally racially segregated public housing.
It was separate racial sales per person's
brokers and Realtors associations.
It was redlining.
It was actions that at a whole -- many,
many different levels of state
and local government creating basically a vice
where Black folks couldn't choose freely where to live.
And that helped to explain the neighborhoods.
And then for Judge Roth saw this every day in his courtroom,
and he saw these maps, these census maps.
So he had the 1940, 1950, 1960, and 1970 census maps.
And what it showed is with that Black folks were
sort of living in the center portion of the city
and that every 10 years they'd break out of a little portion
and they get re-contained and break out and sort of spill over
and they get contained yet again.
And so containment is basically the shorthand
for what they showed in the trial.
But it's also a way to think about
Northern Jim Crow more generally.
That's one of the reasons
why I think that this case and this book
is so important because it wasn't just
like Detroit was this sort of unusual kind of one-off,
particularly strange and awful place.
Detroit was actually, as much as I love it,
pretty, you know, standard fair when it came to
how it was that Black folks were living in the North.
And what really happened was that we had a nationwide system
of Jim Crow that had regional variations.
And the regional variation was in Detroit,
but it was in Chicago, and it was in Seattle,
and it was in Los Angeles,
and a whole lot of other areas as well.
-When you think about what happened and when --
and what is continuing to happen since the lawsuit failed,
you do end the book on a hopeful note.
-I do.
-If you were to go back and do a second edition of the book,
would you change that hopeful note
or are you really still an optimist?
-So my book is the story of a tragic lost opportunity
that I think that we had as Americans to come together
and to bring our children together,
to be educated together, and to live together.
And I think the question that our nation faces right now
is whether we're going to have a functioning,
a truly functioning multiracial democracy.
I finished the book last year.
Obviously, it takes some time
for the book manuscript to go into --
it's got to go through production, editing,
all that kind of stuff.
-Yeah.
-So I finished the book before the outcome
of this election was known. -Right.
-But I have to say, I don't think I would change it.
And the reason why I wouldn't change it is
because I think that we all
as Americans have to be hopeful and optimistic
and we've got to work towards that future.
Ultimately, what my book asks is what kind of society
do we really want to have
and what are the preconditions for having that society?
And I think, and I hope readers will come with me
through this journey,
is that the preconditions for having a truly functioning,
multiracial democracy are to educate our children
from the earliest grades together across race and class.
And that as they grow up together
and learn from each other,
we will dispel a lot of the hostility and negativity
and stereotype, and racism that we see today.
And so part of the reason
I think we have arrived at this moment is
because we went in the wrong direction in 1974.
And so it's upon us, all of us,
all of us Americans to move forward
and to reclaim our democracy.
So I am still optimistic that we can do that.
And I look back on our ancestors
and all the characters in the book,
and the folks who came before them
who have handed the baton to us,
and I think it is now on us to make that promise real.
-One of the things your book does so well
is point out how these issues are so interrelated
when you have the housing bill and the school bill,
in effect, they were heading toward the same end,
which was this multiracial
multi-ethnic functioning democracy.
I think often what I see is that too many people think
that you can fix one part of our society
without addressing all the other needs.
And I'm not sure that your book convinced me
that there are enough people to face that issue.
-Well, so here's the thing.
I think each of us is only one person and none --
no one person can fix everything,
but each of us can try to fix one thing.
And so the great optimism that I brought to the book
in terms of putting this much time and effort
into doing the research and the great sort of ambition I have,
is to work the demand side.
And when I say the demand side is --
because you just said there may not be enough people.
And so what I have trusted in is the idea that just
as Judge Roth was able to be convinced by facts,
that other folks will be able to do that too.
And so I have provided and I have done the thing
that I wanted to do
and to use my skill and my talent to deliver a story
and to deliver some history lessons,
but in a really accessible but not dumbed down way at all.
-Totally.
-To try to create that demand,
to try to stimulate more people to understand
how incredibly important this is and to say,
listen, when I'm thinking about a good school,
is it really possible to have a good school in this society
in the 21st century that's entirely monolithic?
Is that what a good school is?
Don't we want to educate our children to be able to survive
and to thrive in a society
that has many different kinds of people in it?
It's not -- it's certainly the 3Rs,
and I'm very, very concerned about that and issues
having to do with school finance and school funding,
but it's also about being able to interchange,
to understand, to have empathy even if it's not agreement,
to be able to move forward as one nation,
even notwithstanding our differences that we have.
And so I'm trying to work demand,
I'm trying to stimulate that demand.
And I think if each of us tries to do one thing
that's within our power and our talent to do,
then we will move towards a better future.
-When I grew up in Detroit and attended the public schools,
this was in the years before White flight,
so I did go to an integrated school
and I do remember inviting a woman -- a friend, Connie Smith,
her name was to sleep over.
And her mother felt that she --
because this was the -- this was Detroit at that time,
and even though it was,
we lived in an integrated neighborhood at that time.
And Connie's mother came to my house
because she was afraid that I had not told my parents
that Connie was Black and she wanted to protect her daughter.
And of course,
that was not necessary in that particular case.
But you -- when I look back on my elementary school,
I remember how wonderful -- how integrate --
how we did -- you know, it was just a wonderful experience
and I think reading your book and the possibilities
that it raised just made me think about what we've lost
and what those students who are now, well,
who are now attending that elementary school
that I went to, what they've lost in this whole kind of,
well, when the case was turned down,
when Milliken versus Bradley lost.
-I think about it,
and I talk about this in the book at many different points.
And I think about desegregation as being a twofer, right?
So for Black students, one of the things is,
is that we've learned through sort of hard experience
that green tends to follow White.
And so in terms of resourcing schools,
one of the main success stories
that isn't as well appreciated is in the South
where desegregation,
the experience that we had there during the height
of the desegregation period,
roughly from around 1968 through 1980
or so you had tons of additional resources flowing
into Black schools.
And so you're getting both the resource allocation
because what we see is that school authorities
that are required to engage in court order desegregation
have to basically now level schools up.
And so you're getting additional resources that are flowing in.
And the -- that's one part of the twofer,
the other part of the twofer is what you just talked about,
which is the ability for students to come together
from the youngest grades
and to be able to break down some of the problems
that we see today.
And so that's why I've become so passionate
about school desegregation,
in part
because I think people don't understand what
a successful social policy it was,
but also because it contains that other element
that I think we haven't seen in other kinds of social policies
that are associated with education,
which is the ability to take us to the next place
we need to go as Americans with respect to our democracy.
-Michelle, thank you so much for being on the show today
and talking about your book.
And it is an important and so readable.
You know, I was a librarian for many years,
and we would talk about nonfiction
for the interested reader, and rather than,
oh, this is an -- as opposed to an academic treatise.
And your book is the perfect book for anyone
who is interested in history, our history,
the history of our country,
and especially as your subtitle says,
the battle for racial justice in the North.
So thank you for the book and being on the show.
-Nancy, I can't thank you enough.
And what you just said is music to my ears.
That was exactly what I was trying to do
and I thank you for appreciating it.
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