Michelle Adams, "The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North" (FSG Press, 2025)

Mar 12, 2026

Michelle Adams, a law professor and Detroit scholar, tells the story of Milliken v. Bradley and the fight over metropolitan school integration. She traces housing segregation, Judge Roth’s metropolitan remedy, and how Nixon-era Supreme Court shifts halted cross-border solutions. Conversations touch on local leaders, surprising alliances, and policy paths toward more integrated schools.

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INSIGHT

Containment Was A Regional Housing Mechanism

Northern school segregation was built from interdependent housing policies, not just neighborhood choice.
Adams describes maps showing a "movable ghetto" formed by redlining, restrictive covenants, and state and local actions that contained Black residents in Detroit.

ANECDOTE

How Maps Converted Judge Roth

Judge Stephen Roth began the trial hostile but changed his view after seeing NAACP evidence.
Adams recounts how giant census-overlay maps persuaded Roth that Black residents often lacked real choice about where to live.

INSIGHT

Roth's Metropolitan Remedy Included Suburbs

Roth found constitutional liability and ordered a metropolitan remedy that would include roughly 50 suburban districts.
Adams explains he included suburbs to prevent incentivizing white flight and to create meaningful desegregation across southeastern Michigan.

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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: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North (FSG Press, 2025), 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 tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Guest: Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and other publications. She was born and grew up in Detroit.

Host: Michael Stauch is an associate professor of history at the University of Toledo and the author of Wildcat of the Streets: Detroit in the Age of Community Policing, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.

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