Michelle Adams — The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North - with Sheryll Cashin

This event is in partnership with the Washington DC ACS Lawyer Chapter.  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. PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374250423?ic_referral=1Bad96OOxS7d0iWPbxmY1XHAVIHlbpULz4HHrb-lmakwM2Av4F3GtfKglOwABxva6iFEAfeAi1frFJW7_D-BBsPYdpM9aN-4xHbdpha-ksRNdH8kPNs5uC_VYch6F5teZOCtOA 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. Adams is in conversation with Sheryll Cashin. Cashin is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Civil Rights and Social Justice at Georgetown University. She teaches Constitutional Law and Race & American Law among other subjects and is an acclaimed author. She writes about racial justice and democracy. Her most recent book, White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality, is about the role of segregation and redlining in reproducing inequality. Her books have been nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Nonfiction (2015), and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction (2005, 2009, and 2018). Cashin is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. A contributing writer for Politico Magazine, she has also written commentaries for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Salon, The Root, and others. *recorded 1/21/2025