In June 1972, Judge Roth ordered a broad integration plan, which included affluent suburbs such as Grosse Pointe and Bloomfield Hills in the same “metropolitan” school district as Detroit. That is, he instituted a system of “busing” — a word that was as politically incendiary at the time as “trans” is today. The suburbs recoiled in terror and the politicians got involved.
On May 16, 1972, George Wallace, the secessionist governor of Alabama, had driven an anti-busing platform to a landslide victory in the Democratic primary in Michigan. (He had been shot and paralyzed in Maryland the day before.) Re-election candidate Richard Nixon had called for “an immediate halt to all new busing mandates by federal courts,” and his campaign responded to Roth’s ruling with a television ad declaring : “President Nixon thinks the bus is wrong. And he intends to do something about it.” Meanwhile, the state of Michigan appealed Roth’s order to the Supreme Court in a case called Milliken v. Bradley.
The issue before the court was profound. In Brown, the court held that segregating students based on race was unconstitutional, but how did that ruling apply to schools located in neighborhoods that happened to be racially segregated—in other words, when racial segregation was not a binding school policy? school district (de jure segregation) but the reality of the community (de facto segregation)? By 1974, Nixon had placed four new justices on the court, and they formed the core of the 5-to-4 majority that voted in July to overturn Roth’s desegregation award scheme on the grounds that the Constitution required states to correct only de jure, not de facto, segregation. (Roth himself died of a heart attack at age 66, shortly before the Supreme Court decision was announced.)
In an apt summary, Adams writes that Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion “was predicated on white innocence. … There was no recognition of how Blacks were locked into specific Detroit neighborhoods and mostly Black schools, and then into an ever-expanding urban core that was hermetically sealed off from the suburbs.” Although a later, much more modest plan by Roth’s successor, another federal judge, attempted to address segregation in Detroit, it affected just 10 percent of students in the city’s school system and left many schools untouched. (Adams notes that during this period, there was actually more successful court-ordered integration in Southern public schools because municipalities there tended to include suburbs, while in northern suburbs cities were often legally separate from the cities they adjoined . ) Overall, as Adams puts it, “Milliken was where Brown’s promise ended.”
