On Topic: Michelle Adams’s “The Containment” (Racial Justice in the North)

Introducing On Topic, a new series at City of Asylum highlighting current events and topical social issues. For our series launch, we welcome esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams to explore class and race in a discussion of her new book, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. Michelle will be joined in conversation by journalist Tony Norman, who has written on race, politics, and culture in Pittsburgh for over 30 years. 

Praised by the New Yorker as “passionate and well researched,” The Containment dives deep into a momentous 1974 Supreme Court ruling: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and with it, a halt to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. 

How did this come about, and why?

Through compelling portraits of a city under stress and key figures—including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell—The Containment tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools. Michelle 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.

You can purchase a copy of Michelle’s book, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, at City of Asylum Bookstore.

About the Author:

Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former co-director 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.

About the Moderator:

Tony Norman is an award-winning columnist and feature writer who began his career at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1988. He became the paper’s pop music/pop culture critic in 1989 and a general interest columnist who wrote about race, politics, and culture in 1995. In 1999, Tony joined the PG‘s editorial board and regularly appeared as the closing commentator on KD/PG Sunday Edition from 1999 to 2005. Tony took a Knight-Wallace Fellowship sabbatical at the University of Michigan from 2005 to 2006. In 2012, Tony was named the PG‘s book review editor on top of his column and editorial duties. In 2016, Tony left the PG‘s editorial board. In 2022, Tony left the PG after three decades and joined NEXTpittsburgh. Tony continues to write for NEXT as a freelance feature writer. He also appears at PublicSource. His opinion columns appear regularly at Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

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