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

Mar 11, 2026

Michelle Adams, Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law and constitutional scholar, tells the story of Milliken v. Bradley and Detroit’s fight over school integration. She traces Judge Stephen Roth’s metropolitan remedy, the clash with Nixon-era Supreme Court conservatives, and the roles of Detroit leaders, activists, and suburbs. The conversation focuses on how legal choices reshaped racial justice in the North.

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INSIGHT

Containment Explained By Housing Maps

The NAACP proved Northern school segregation by tying it to housing segregation with census-overlay maps showing a movable ghetto containment pattern.
The maps traced Black population shifts from 1940 to 1970, demonstrating state and private actions that confined Black residents to central Detroit.

INSIGHT

How Judge Roth Was Persuaded

Judge Stephen Roth shifted from skepticism to finding state responsibility after seeing the NAACP's housing evidence and census maps.
Roth concluded Black residents lacked real choice, changing his view from private choice to state-enabled containment.

INSIGHT

Roth's Metropolitan Remedy Vision

Roth's remedy extended beyond Detroit into roughly 50 suburban districts creating an 800,000-student metropolitan remedy to achieve meaningful desegregation.
He relied on state authority over districts and feared a city-only remedy would accelerate white flight and worsen segregation.

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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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