by Michelle Adams
Picador USA
1/13/2026, paperback
SKU: 9781250397546
The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs--and the defeat of desegregation in the North.
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 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.
Reviews:
"Adams deftly illuminates the complex history and significance of the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley...[The Containment] is a riveting narrative that sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit's separate and unequal school system in the 1960s and early 1970s, digging deep to tell the story about a creative, hard-fought attempt at metropolitan desegregation." -- BookPage (starred review)
"Michelle Adams has written a truly beautiful, intimate, and powerful history of ordinary Detroiters' determined fight to finally ensure equality of opportunity for Black children. As she makes painfully clear, the educational and residential segregation that came to devastate the country thereafter was not at all inevitable. It was an active choice and a legal betrayal on the part of too many Americans who were on the wrong side of history but whose short-sightedness might yet be undone." -- Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
"Michelle Adams has written the definitive history of Milliken v. Bradley, one of the most important Supreme Court cases of all time. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Containment fundamentally changes how we understand the history of civil rights. This page-turner illuminates how battles over school desegregation shaped cities and suburbs, and explains why issues like affirmative action remain political battlegrounds today." -- Matthew F. Delmont, Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth and author of Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
About the Author:
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 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 writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.