Join Southfield Library, IRP Detroit, and Book Beat as we welcome author Michelle Adams with her new book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. This special presentation and booksigning will take place October 16 at 6 p.m. at the Southfield Public Library, 26300 Evergreen Rd, Southfield, MI 48076.
The epic story of Detroit’s struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs and the defeat of desegregation in the North.
Professor Michelle Adams’s book exploring a landmark school desegregation case is the 2025 winner of the Stone Book Award from the Museum of African American History Boston | Nantucket.
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 is firm in her belief, like that of Justice Thurgood Marshall and many others, that students thrive most in diverse settings. As she writes, the research shows that “students in racially and socioeconomically integrated schools and classrooms have stronger academic outcomes and higher test scores, are more likely to enroll in college, have higher earnings and health outcomes as adults, and are less likely to become incarcerated.”
–The New York Times review: How the Dream of School Integration Died
The key piece to understand is that Jim Crow was a national governmental policy. It looked different in different parts of the country, but the policy itself was national. I hope readers gain a better understanding of the national policy of Jim Crow and how it operated.
–Michelle Adams from the University of Michigan Law School: Five Questions with Michelle Adams
Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on race discrimination, school desegregation, affirmative action, and housing law. Adams is the winner of the 2024 L. Hart Wright Teaching Award. She has published in The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and other scholarly journals. Her work also has appeared in the popular media, including a piece in The New Yorker commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. In addition, she has appeared as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court.