The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

In this riveting debut history from Adams, a law professor at the University of Michigan, a 1970 school integration plan proposed by liberal members of the Detroit Board of Education kicks off a contentious legal battle that results in the Supreme Court effectively ending school desegregation in the North. The narrative features fine-grained character portraits of such key players as Nathaniel Jones (the “measured” NAACP lawyer who argued the case before the Supreme Court) and Stephen J. Roth (a cantankerous federal judge who ruled in the NAACP’s favor) set against scenes that capture the city’s tumult during the integration effort—most of it provoked by irate anti-integration white parents. Adams’s meticulous recapping of the NAACP’s trial arguments serves as a disturbing window onto how Northern states created and maintained segregation—for instance, by situating public housing to avoid mixed-race developments and discouraging realtors from showing Black homebuyers houses in white neighborhoods. The overwhelming evidence convinced the skeptical Roth, who ordered a metropolitan integration plan that would have incorporated school districts from Detroit and its predominantly white suburbs, only for the Supreme Court to scrap Roth’s plan as an unacceptable violation of school district autonomy, a decision that marked the Burger Court’s turn away from the pro–racial justice leanings of the Warren Court. Rich in detail yet sprawling in scope, this shouldn’t be missed. (Jan.)