In Black America

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio. This is in Black America.

Michelle Adams: Thumbnail sketch of Brown v. Board of Education decided in 1954 concerning southern states, border states, and these were places that required school kids to go to separate racially separate schools. By law and by law. You often hear this fancy term called dere, but what it just really means is that there’s a state law that require or, or an ordinance.

That requires the kids to be separated in school on the basis of race. And in 1954, the Supreme Court said, you know what? That’s unconstitutional. It violates the United States Constitution, and it struck all of those laws down. And so that’s what Brown is about and sort of Brown is really. The beginning in a lot of ways of our modern civil rights era, but also the, the, the case that’s the bedrock that the, the state can’t decide.

You know what, we’re gonna send black kids to one school and white kids to another.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Michelle Adams, law professor at the University of Michigan Law School, an author of Containment Detroit, the Supreme Court, in a Battle for Racial Justice in the North, published by Macmillan publishers. 2024 marked the seventh anniversary of Brown B Board of Education, the Landmark 1954 US Supreme Court case.

In it, the court said that separating children on the basis of race in public schools was unconstitutional and rejected the notion that separate schools could be separate but equal. Brown rightfully became iconic, a watershed moment in the progress toward racial equality in this country. 20 years after Brown, another US Supreme Court decision, lesser known to many effectively stopped the promise of Brown in his tracks.

In a book containment, Adam, sell the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit Public Schools. I’m John L. Hansen Jr. And welcome to another edition of In Black America on this week’s program, containment Detroit, the Supreme Court and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. With Michelle Adams, professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School in Black America.

Michelle Adams: That’s a good question. And so let’s talk about this. So what we were talking about before was, well, how did the schools become segregated in the north? So we gotta figure out how that happened. And one of the ways that that happened was is that if the, if the neighborhoods are residentially segregated.

And we can talk about the, the way that happens if you then have school authorities who say, well, you have to go to school in your neighborhood, or you have to go to a school that’s nearby, then what would, what that means is that the school authorities are essentially incorporating the underlying residential segregation, but then they turn around and say, it’s got nothing to do with us because we just run the schools.

We don’t have anything to do with the neighborhoods. We’re not realtors. Right. We don’t, we aren’t, we don’t lend mortgages. We don’t sell houses. Right. That’s one of the big pieces is trying to get at the role of housing, uh, and housing segregation as it affected the schools.

John L. Hanson Jr.: In 1950, Detroit had nearly 2 million residents and was the fourth largest city in the nation.

It was a city on the move, but behind the bluster was an unsettling reality. In Detroit, Jim Crow was alive and well. Michigan prohibits segregation in public education decades before. The Supreme Court did the same for the country and Brown Beach Board of Education in 1954, yet nearly 20 years after Brown, the public schools in the motor city remained totally segregated.

In 1970, the NAACP filed sued against stating local officials in federal court, the plaintiff billed a case showing that residential segregation that led to local school segregation was a result of purposeful decision made by stating local government something that had never been successfully argued before.

Recently in Black America, spoke with law professor Michelle Adams as a native Detroiter, I am also a native Detroiter. What was life like growing up in the motor city?

Michelle Adams: Well, you know, it’s interesting in that I grew up in the motor city, but I kind of had my, you know, feet in two separate worlds. I, you know, I, the, the neighborhood I lived in is called Palmer Woods, close to the border of, uh, the suburbs right off of, uh.

Eight mile and off of Woodward. Mm-hmm. And so I grew up in a black community, uh, with, you know, my father was a lawyer. All the parents that I knew, they were, they were doctors, they were lawyers, they were school administrators, they were nurses. Uh, they had all gone to HBCUs and it was an incredibly wonderful community.

And I can’t think of a better place to grow up. So I, I had one foot there, but then I also had another foot in a white community because my parents made a decision for me when I was only three or four years old to send me to Roper City and Country School, which is in Bloomfield Hills. And so every day for 14 years, I would get on a very long bus, very long bus ride, and I would be, you know, going to this school, which actually ended up being a great place for me.

And so I really, as a kid growing up, really was able to kind of, I had, I had my. Myself, my, my sort of who I am, who I became really was, uh, because of both of those kinds of influences. Was

John L. Hanson Jr.: it a foregone conclusion that you were gonna become an attorney?

Michelle Adams: Well, you know, I idolized my father. He had gone to Detroit College of Law, graduated in 1957, put himself through law school, uh, working on the line def He did mostly criminal work, defended several generations of Detroiters.

I remember folks coming by and paying him and had cheese and mm-hmm. When they didn’t have, when they didn’t have the money. And so, you know, I really, I would go downtown and watch him do his thing. And so I, I kind of always thought I was gonna be a lawyer. Absolutely.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Prior to your professorship at the University of Michigan, what other faculty positions have you held?

Michelle Adams: Uh, I came here in, in, uh, 2022. Before that I was at Cardozo Law School in Manhattan, which is a division of Yeshiva. And before that I was at Seton Hall Law School in Newark, New Jersey.

John L. Hanson Jr.: And what led you to, uh, take on this tremendous task of talking about Milliken v Bradley?

Michelle Adams: Well, it, you know, it’s really been a labor of love and it’s been one that’s taken me many years.

As a law professor in terms of what I teach, I teach constitutional law. If you teach the Brown case, which I’m happy to talk about, you will get into talking about some of the cases that came after Brown. And so this would always be kind of a footnote, you know, something that we just mentioned for a minute or two, uh, while we were on our way to talking about other things.

But I knew that the case took place in Detroit, and because I’m from Detroit, I was really, really interested in it. So every chance I got, I would read more and more and more about the case. And there’s been like 25 books about Brown, but not so much written about Milliken versus Bradley, like a book and a half.

And the more I read, the more interested I got and the more interested I got, the more I wanted to read. You know how that goes.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: And so I started to believe that there was just this incredible story there. At a certain point I thought, I’ve gotta write about this, and if only for myself, and I thought, I wanna write a book that I wanna read.

And I sort of trusted that if I wanted to read it, then other folks would wanna read it too.

John L. Hanson Jr.: And for those that aren’t familiar with Brown V Board of Education, give us a thumbnail of, of that particular case in the decision.

Michelle Adams: Thumbnail sketch of Brown V. Board of Education decided in 1954 concerning southern states, border states, and these were places that required.

School kids to go to separate racially separate schools by law and by law. You often hear this fancy term called dere, but what it just really means is that there’s a state law that require, or, or an ordinance that requires the kids to be separated in school on the basis of race. And in 1954, the Supreme Court said, you know what?

That’s unconstitutional. It violates the United States Constitution. And it struck all of those laws down. And so that’s what Brown is about. And sort of brown is really the beginning in a lot of ways of our modern civil rights era, but also the, the, the case that’s the bedrock, that the, the state can’t decide, you know what, we’re gonna send black kids to one school and white kids to another.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Why was this particular case different from Brown in the sense that Brown deals with, I guess, uh, with southern states in this particular case, dealt with northern cities?

Michelle Adams: Well, John, that’s a great question. Um, and this is also one of the reasons why I kept reading about this case and, and why it became so interesting to me.

You know, the Supreme Court would often talk about, and I’ll use these terms and, and I’ll translate them, that they called Dejure, as we mentioned before, which means by law segregation, and then they have this other term called defacto segregation. But what that really means is we don’t know where it came from.

So there’d be all these schools that were like 92% black or 98% black and 93% white. And this is in the north now. And the sort of response was, we don’t know how they got that way. And there’s no law that requires it. And in fact, in Michigan, there was a law that said you couldn’t segregate schools on the basis of race.

And so for me that what’s different is that the question became after Brown versus Board of Education, does that rule in Brown that it’s unconstitutional to separate the students on the basis of race? Does that apply in the north too, where the schools are segregated? Oftentimes the school authorities would say, well, we don’t know how they got that way.

It’s a mystery to us. How could that possibly have happened? But there’s no law that requires it, so we can’t be held responsible, and there’s no constitutional violation. That’s the key difference. The key differences between what we call dejure or by law segregation in this thing called def facto, and in the north, the big question was what caused.

Segregation in the north. And that’s really the, the question. And that’s why this case, Milliken versus Bradley became so important

John L. Hanson Jr.: as a child growing up. We had neighborhood school particularly, uh, the street in which I grew up on, the elementary school was at the end of the block. We ended up going maybe five miles to the junior high school.

And then the high school I went attended was Pering, which was another eight blocks from, from, from our home. So basically there was a neighborhood type of. Magnet system that we were operating on, this was like in the sixties and, and, and, and late fifties. How did that particular model become somewhat of a model or proposal in which they wanted to do with the other schools around the city?

Michelle Adams: That’s a good question. And so let’s talk about this. So what we were talking about before was, well, how did the schools become segregated in the north? So we gotta figure out how that happened. And one of the ways that that happened was, is that. If the neighborhoods are residentially segregated. And we can talk about the, the way that happens if you then have school authorities who say, well, you have to go to school in your neighborhood, or you have to go to a school that’s nearby, then what would, what that means is that the school authorities are essentially incorporating.

The underlying residential segregation, but then they turn around and say, it’s got nothing to do with us because we just run the schools. We don’t have anything to do with the neighborhoods. We’re not realtors. Right. We don’t, we aren’t, we don’t lend mortgages. We don’t sell houses. Right. And so that’s, that’s one of the big pieces is trying to get at the role of housing.

Uh, and housing segregation as it affected the schools.

John L. Hanson Jr.: How did we get to the point where housing was the main culprit of, of how the school system was operating?

Michelle Adams: That’s also a really, really good question, and the answer is that, and this is why it gets a little complicated. There’s so many different players.

Actors, you know, it’s not like one thing that you can see that’s so clear, like in the south where it’s just like, you know, white’s only drinking fountain. But I’ll give you some examples, right? So they had these things called racially restrictive covenants. And so for a long time, up until the Supreme Court struck them down, if you wanted to buy a house and there was a racially restrictive covenant in the deed, right?

You couldn’t sell that house to a black family. The deed itself would say, you know what? This house can’t be sold to a black family, a Jewish family, et cetera. And those racially restrictive covenants were in the deeds of all new subdivisions in the city of Detroit between 1910 and 1950. And then during the trial, which we can talk about, it turns out that one of the major title insurance companies, ’cause you don’t have to get title insurance when you wanna sell a house.

Was still reporting that these racially restrictive covenants were in the deeds even after the Supreme Court said they were unconstitutional. And even after there was a federal statute passed in 1968 called the Fair Housing Act that says you can’t have racially restrictive covenants anymore. Right? So that’s one way.

So that’s. One piece of it. Then there was the federal government, and it turns out the federal government had a big role in segregating our neighborhoods in a couple of different ways, right? So we have the depression, the New Deal, and then we have all this regulation and these new agencies that are there to set up, to kind of help people if they, if they’ve gotten behind in there.

House payments or to prevent foreclosures or to create new mortgages to make it easier to buy a home. And so that’s all great and wonderful, but in a lot of times with the federal government, either through the Federal Housing Administration or something called the Homeowners Loan Corporation, they would do things like requiring that you put a racially restrictive covenant into a deed before they would provide federal mortgage insurance.

Okay. Or they would say something called redlining, which I think a lot of listeners have heard about. They’d say, well, you know, if you wanna get federal insurance or if you wanna get a federal loan, you know you have to. It has to be in a certain area and it’s gotta be a good place to be able to lend. So they would send these examiners out and they would look at all the black neighborhoods and say, oh no, those are not good places to lend.

We’re gonna redline them. And so those neighborhoods wouldn’t be eligible for federally insured mortgages. Right. So there are lots of ways that housing will segregated and. It was governmental policy. And so when the, when you then put on top of that a neighborhood school rule, it means that the underlying government policy that segregated the neighborhoods just flowed into the schools.

And then the school authorities would do things on top of that to further segregate the schools.

John L. Hanson Jr.: I found it interesting when you grow up, you see things and you really don’t understand why they’re there. Like I said, prior to our conversation, I grew up in Corner Gardens, Crans Woods, so I was like one mile from eight Mile.

Mm-hmm. And you are familiar with Eight Mile and I did see the wall. Yeah. Talk to us about the wall that separated Warren, Michigan from Detroit, Michigan. That became somewhat a sort of a, a, a sore spot, particularly for African Americans, um, in Detroit. So the segregation

Michelle Adams: wall, the eight

John L. Hanson Jr.: mile

Michelle Adams: wall?

John L. Hanson Jr.: Yeah. Yes.

Michelle Adams: Did you know about that wall when you were

John L. Hanson Jr.: growing up there? I knew about, I saw the wall, but really didn’t understand the purpose of the wall itself.

Michelle Adams: Yes. Well, I grew up nearby there too. ’cause Palmer Woods is nearby there too. Yeah, exactly.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: I had never even seen the wall. But if I’d seen it just like you, I wouldn’t have known what it was exactly.

It’s a half mile long, six feet high. It’s sort of just this wall that separates these streets. And it turns out that, you know, after the 1930s there was a, there was a black community living there and they were, they were basically a self-sustaining community. They weren’t getting a lot of support from the city, and at some point a white developer wanted to start building houses there.

And this is after the New Deal programs that I told you about. And so the white developer wants to be able to get access to the federally backed loans and the insurance programs and all of that. And basically the Fed stated the developer, well, you know, we did our little redlining thing and it’s not really safe for us to lend there.

But if you build a wall between where you’re gonna put your new houses. And the black neighborhood, then we will provide federal insurance and federally backed loans on the white side of the wall, but they weren’t gonna provide it on the black side of the wall. So there’s basically a literal segregation wall in Detroit, but you wouldn’t know it.

And that’s one of the things to think about, the distinction between what we mean by dejure, by law, and that, and defacto, which means in the north, you know, this was governmental policy, but it wasn’t labeled. It wasn’t obvious, but it was still governmental policy. And that’s the thing that was, and we can talk about the trial, uh, and the litigation.

That’s the thing that the lawyers ended up really wanting to show that it wasn’t just happenstance that black folks happened to live where they live. It was also because they were contained in certain areas, in certain neighborhoods and certain sections of Detroit. And then the school authorities built on that.

I

John L. Hanson Jr.: understand. You’re listening to In Black America with John L. Hanson Jr. We’ll be back with more of our conversation in just a moment. Every just joining us, I’m Johnny O. Hanson Jr. And you’re listening to In Black America, from KUT Radio, and we speak with Michelle Adams, professor, law of the University of Michigan Law School, and author of Containment Detroit Supreme Court and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North.

Professor Adams, did Citizens of Detroit get to the point where something needed to take place in educating their young children?

Michelle Adams: This is something else that’s a bit of an unknown story that I talk about in my book. One of the things I didn’t know was how much black parents, black folks, members of the black community were protesting, boycotting, uh, doing all kinds of actions in the 1960s.

So the, so Brown was in 1954, going into the late 1950s and into the 1960s. There were black folks in lots of northern cities, including Detroit, Los Angeles. Seattle, et cetera, who were protesting saying the schools are segregated. We know they’re segregated. We wanna have desegregated schools, we wanna have integrated schools.

And so there’s all this community activity that’s going on. Black parents aren’t taking this lying down. And there was actually an early case in Detroit that happened around 1962. So black folks are aware of this, and one of the things they want is desegregated schools. And they wanna be able to have choice, and they don’t wanna have to be told, well, we.

If our kids have to go here, because one of the things they knew, and one of the, one of the things that, that the plaintiffs in the case I write about. Some of them talked about was this notion of, or this theory was Green follows white. It’s not just that the schools are segregated, it’s that they’re also under-resourced.

And oftentimes the school authorities wouldn’t provide as many resources as much money to the black schools as to the white schools. And so the black parents don’t let that for very good reasons. Uh, and they want that to stop.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Who were some of the first individuals that was putting forth this effort to.

Articulate something needed to, to change.

Michelle Adams: Well, one of the things that’s so interesting is you get this guy Detroit’s leading black nationalist, Albert CLE Jr. And the book opens in 1967 and initially he had been part of this sort of wave of, uh, sort of helping black parents in Detroit pushed for integration in the early 1960s and then over, over the course of the 1960s, like many other black folks, for reasons that make a lot of sense.

So just said, you know what, we wanna get white people out of the schools. This is the moment of, of what’s called community control. Where the theory is is that the, the school district, the, the school authorities are running a separate and unequal school system, and there’s no reason to believe white folks are gonna change that.

And so let’s get white teachers and white administrators out of the school system. Let’s turn, let’s let the black parents and black teachers run the schools and we’re gonna have a more fair and equal and a better school system. And so he really starts pushing for this. And the story that I tell in my book is one where you have this community activity and then at the same time you have a changeover in the politics of the Detroit School Board where you suddenly have the school board that actually cares about this.

Right, so you’ve got more liberals who take over the school board, and so you’ve got this kind of confrontation between clay, sort of sort of throwing down the gauntlet to the school board saying, you know, we’re tired of this. We want community control. Then the head of the school, the what, who becomes the head of the school board, A guy named Abraham’s Wording, who’s really sort of a big integrationist, ultimately decides or, or tries to push through a limited integration plan in the city of Detroit, uh, having to do with, with integrating the city’s high schools.

And he does this and the state of Michigan turns around and passes a law, basically voiding this limited integration plan. Right, so, so think about this from this perspective. It’s as if the state is saying you may not have desegregated schools in the city of Detroit. You want, you have an integration plan, guess what?

You can’t have it. And that’s when the NAACP gets involved because they say, this feels kind of southern, right? You have you passing a law that prevents integration. NAACP Detroit branch decides to sue. And that’s really when the litigation that I write about gets started.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Who sat to judge the case? Milli Bradley,

Michelle Adams: really interesting guy.

Had been a guy named Steven Roth, uh, was an immigrant to the United States from Hungary. Grew up in Flint, went to the University of Michigan law school, part of the conservative wing of the Democratic Party. Was very skeptical about the NAACP’s claims when the cases first filed. Didn’t think there was anything wrong with Detroit schools.

Didn’t think they were segregated. Really doubted the idea that there could be state imposed segregation above the Mason-Dixon line. So initially he’s like, get outta my courtroom. Very, very skeptical. And then over the course of a couple of years, and as the NAACP broadens the case, and they have this big trial in downtown Detroit, 41 day trial, 10 days of which were about the housing stuff that I talked about a couple of minutes ago.

It was about racially restrictive covenants and how the federal government had an unequal system of mortgage lending and mortgage support. And about how public housing in Detroit was intentionally, racially segregated and about white. Homeowners associations with violent tendencies and a whole lot of other things, separate racially separate brokers association, and then all the things the school authorities were doing on top of it.

And over time. One of the things that happens with this judge is he’s open to facts. He’s skeptical, he. He doesn’t necessarily believe it at the beginning, but one of the most important things that comes out of the book is the idea that people can be convinced by things called facts. And the lawyers did an incredibly good job.

They told a story. They put a story before him and he was able to see that. In fact, the reason why the schools in Detroit were segregated had to do with state and local governmental action.

John L. Hanson Jr.: I found it interesting Alexander Richie and how his conversion helped solidified what Judge Roth was gonna eventually rule on.

Michelle Adams: John, I, I love how closely you’ve read this book, and I’m so excited that, that you’re, that we’re having this conversation. So there’s a guy named Alexander Richie. And you know, white Detroiters who are living mostly sort of in the northern part mm-hmm. Of the city. Mm-hmm. Right. Sort of get wind of this lawsuit.

And they get wind of the idea that in fact there might be some, some change, some racial change in the schools. And of course they want community control too. They want to control their own schools. And so this group called Citizens Committee for Better Education, it’s a fancy word called intervention, but what it means is they actually become part of this lawsuit and their lawyer is Alexander Richie.

Alexander Ricci is not exactly anybody’s vision of an integrationist, right? He’s there to protect white Detroiters interests, but he, like Roth is sitting in the courtroom day after day after day two, and he starts to understand how things really work in Detroit. And also he starts to understand that if in fact the court rules that.

This is this. This is a brown violation, just like below the Mason-Dixon line. The question then becomes, well, what’s the remedy for that? In the south, the remedy was desegregation In the north. If the remedy was desegregation, then maybe all the white folks who were in the suburbs ought to be included too.

Right, because a lot of the evidence that’s coming into Judge Roth’s courtroom doesn’t stop at the eight mile line. Doesn’t stop at the boundary of the city of Detroit. And so white Detroiters thought, if there’s gonna be integration, shouldn’t just be us. Right? It shouldn’t just be the white Detroiters.

It should include the white folks in the suburbs. Suburbs are almost entirely white. Very, very difficult for black families to buy housing and then be able to attend school in suburban locations. And so the way in which we end up getting this idea that in fact you could have this remedy for state imposed governmentally imposed segregation in Detroit schools, that we should include the larger metropolitan area doesn’t come from the naacp, doesn’t come from the black plaintiffs, doesn’t come from the black parents, it comes from Detroit’s whites.

Who say and and their lawyer, Alexander Ricci, who says, you know what? I think maybe we should look across the city line. If we’re gonna have, maybe we should try to think about having what’s called a metropolitan remedy. So that’s really something interesting, and I think that’s something that, that most readers don’t know.

I didn’t know. Most law professors don’t know. Incredibly interesting.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Exactly. Before round our time, professor Adams talk to us about. Damon Keith and his decision with the Pontiac school system that was similar in nature to what was happening in Detroit.

Michelle Adams: So I had the great, wonderful honor of interviewing Damon Keith before he passed in 2015.

And Damon Keith is somebody who I had heard about for many years and sort of a legend in Detroit and Damon Keith was a, a federal trial court. Judge in Pontiac and there was a lawsuit brought in Pontiac, pretty similar kind of lawsuit. And Damon Keith decided, basically found that the Pontiac schools were also separate.

You know, they, they were running a separate but quote unquote equal school system in Pontiac, and so he ordered the Pontiac schools b desegregated. And in he was the subject of death threats and all kinds of other stuff. And so I had a chance to talk with him about that. But he knew Judge Raw and he understood what was happening in Detroit and he was sort of part of a larger group of black judges that I talk about in the book Who, one of the things I talk about is the idea of like what I asked the question, what does it mean to be a good judge?

John L. Hanson Jr.: Michelle Adams, law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and author of Containment Detroit, the Supreme Court, and a Battle for Racial Justice in the North. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions as to future in Black America programs, email us at In Black america@kut.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over.

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John L. Hanson Jr.:  Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez. I’m John L. Hanson, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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