Professor Michelle Adams describes the struggles to integrate Detroit’s highly segregated neighborhoods and schools in the 1960s, a federal judge’s ruling to alleviate that segregation by bussing students between the predominately Black schools in Detroit and predominantly white schools in the suburbs, and the Supreme Court’s subsequent 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision that acknowledged the segregated state of Detroit schools but overturned the “metropolitan remedy,” thereby allowing de facto school segregation to persist today.

Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and author of The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North.

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