[LASTING RACIALLY

MOTIVATED
INJUSTICES IN
UNITED STATES’
PUBLIC SCHOOLS]
Detroit, Michigan
Milliken v. Bradley:
a Supreme Court case study

Grace E. Novacek
 2

When slavery was abolished, the Northern region of the United States had been regarded

colloquially as an area free from the violent racism of the South. The North was a land of “true”

freedom, a stark opposite of the South; the North served as a passageway out of slavery and its

prejudicial confines to an array of endless education, residency, and job opportunity. The

conception was that the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas decision to

discontinue the practice of separate but equal public schools based solely on race was not

applicable to the North, as it was fully integrated and thus free from prejudicial practices.

Although these presumptions were, on the books, true, the North exemplified its own underlying

racially based discriminatory practices, distinct from those of the South. An important

clarification to make before further analyzing the different forms of racism in the two regions is

the meaning of de jure versus de facto. De jure literally means by law, which refers to legislation

allowing or enforcing actions taken, such as the implementation of the Jim Crow Black Codes in

the South. De facto, however, means by fact, or by practice, which was the manner in which the

North expressed racism: not necessarily legally mandated, but present nonetheless, and often

legally sanctioned. In late 1900s, most urban areas in the United States displayed evidence of at

least one of these two forms of discrimination, de jure and de facto; a case study in which the

dichotomy of both de jure and de facto simultaneously exist in the North can be seen in the

examination of Michigan’s historically industrial hub, Detroit. 1

Detroit, an accessible metropolis in the North, began attracting Black people in years as

early as the 1940s. Push factors, such as the risk of violence and lynching, as well as the vicious

1
Dierenfield, Bruce J. “The Civil Rights Movement: Revised Edition.” Pearson Education
Limited. 2008. p. 140.
Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over
Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011. p. 19.
 3

debt cycle of sharecropping, instigated movement to the North from the South. Pull factors in

Detroit specifically, such as the booming job industry and superior housing opportunity, saw an

increase in the percentage of Blacks in Detroit from 16% in 1950 to 44% in 1970. However,

Blacks could not have anticipated the injustice they would face in Detroit; the public education

system became the most blatantly racist but widely unaddressed form of discrimination. In 1871,

Detroit public schools were fully integrated, although the Black population was much smaller at

the time. However, a white supremacy-influenced system of segregation in public schools was

reinstated throughout the next fifty years.2

The drastic increase in percentage of Black Detroit residents between 1950 and 1970 was

due, in part, to large waves of Black migrants, most being products of the United States’ Great

Migrations. Shortly thereafter, Detroit began to see “white flight” – whites relocating from

central city districts to surrounding peripheries due to the increasing Black populations. By 1974,

the central district of the city was comprised of more than 130,000 Black students, whereas each

surrounding district had far fewer, and almost entirely white, students. Blacks in Detroit were

forced to live in certain areas of the city, typically all-Black neighborhoods within the central

district. Real estate agents utilized restrictive covenants to enforce the racial composition of

neighborhoods. After the 1948 ruling to restrict state enforcement of race-specific housing

discrimination, whites resorted to running Blacks out of perceived “white” neighborhoods, or,

upon Blacks’ arrival, left these neighborhoods altogether. As a consequence, Blacks in Detroit

were left with low quality housing and a lack of mobility.3

2
Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy
over Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011. p. 20-22.
3
Clark, W. A. V. “School Desegregation and White Flight: A Reexamination and Case Study.”
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles. 1987. p. 212.
Jones, Nathaniel R. “Milliken v. Bradley: Brown’s troubled journey north.” Fordham Law
 4

Detroit’s deeply segregated residency played into the public education’s segregation. The

state of Michigan enforced neighborhood attendance policies, meaning public school attendance

was dictated by the student’s place of residence. Enforcing attendance based on neighborhood

then enforced schooling based on race, and voting in these segregated districts skewed legislature

in a way that left Black schools with subordinate funding, facilities, and transportation. In

addition, the state adopted an unspoken policy to segregate Black educators and administrators in

majority Black schools, rendering white schools impermeable to Blacks of any age and

residency. The state government perpetuated segregation by not only enforcing these districts

and policies, but actively fighting proposed changes made by the newly introspective Detroit

School Board. In 1970, the April 7th plan attempted to redraw district lines and school attendance

boundaries to alleviate unchecked segregation and its repercussions on quality of education, an

attempt squashed by the state. For Blacks in search of superior education, the action taken by the

state of Michigan was a clear violation of (1) the Fourteenth Amendment right to equal

protection and provision and (2) the Brown v. Board of Education decision that separate but

“equal” education is unconstitutional. The white district insisted that the racially identifiable

schools were a matter of happenstance; however, the legal violation at play was that the state

government had failed to address such unjust practices, exemplifying a different kind of de jure

racism than that of the South: a policy of neglect.4

Review. October 1992. p. 51.

Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over
Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011. p. 27-29, 37-38.
4
D Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy
over Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011. p 66, 76-78
Jones, Nathaniel R. “Milliken v. Bradley: Brown’s troubled journey north.” Fordham Law
Review. October 1992. p. 49.
“Wrong Without Remedy.” New York Times (1923-Current file); Jul 28, 1974; ProQuest
Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. pg. 172.
 5

The lawsuit that followed remains as a baffling example of the challenges the modern

Civil Rights movement face. Lead counsel for the NAACP national group Nathaniel Jones

initially brought the case before a Detroit federal district court in August of 1970, filing suit

against the governor, the attorney general, the state’s public education superintendent, Michigan

and Detroit’s Board of Education, and Detroit’s school superintendent on behalf of minority

parents and students in the Detroit public school system. The plaintiffs’ charged that racially

discriminatory policies and practices created unconstitutional public school segregation and a

city-wide plan to resolve these issues need be implemented prior to the next school year. After

three and a half years of litigation, the decision was made by the Supreme Court in July of 1974.

However, important events in smaller scale courts preceded this decision. In April 1971, after the

plaintiffs had already appealed the district court’s decision twice, the district court judge ruled

that Detroit public schools were, in fact, illegally segregated, and accepted the correlation

between the housing discrimination and unconstitutional segregation. After the defendants

appealed this decision, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a Detroit-only plan would not

be effective in desegregation, and instead, a metropolitan wide solution was the responsibility of

Michigan state. The plaintiffs’ proposed solution included busing children across preexisting

district lines. The defendants relentlessly appealed, and the case finally reached the Supreme

Court in February of 1974. Months of court hearings and deliberation ensued, and despite the

overwhelming amount of explicit evidence condemning the defendants, the Supreme Court ruled

in a 5-4 majority upholding the finding of de jure segregation in Detroit, but dispelling the

proposal for an inter-district, metropolitan wide remedy. The Supreme Court acknowledged the

violation of constitutional rights, but instead decided that solving the problem in Detroit, and

throughout the United States, was virtually impossible. The Supreme Court’s continued
 6

allowance of constitutional violations acted as a form of de jure segregation in and of itself,

upholding the by then nationwide policy of neglect. 5

The timeline of events leading up to the Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley in

Detroit exemplify both de facto and de jure segregation. De facto is seen in white flight, de jure

is seen in Michigan state policies which propagate housing discrimination education inequality.

The Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court decision ultimately failed to provide minority children

with resources for advancement in education. The repercussions of this decision may have been

unforeseeable to some, but Justice Thurgood Marshall provided a dissent with such lasting

relevance that it seems extrasensory: “in the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to

allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities– one white, the other

Black– but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.” Marshall’s words echo

through the urban metropolises in the United States that are still hindered by the crippling,

illegal, and subversive practice of segregation. Although overtly racist legislature has been

discontinued, federal and state lawmakers’ willful and persistent disregard of the Fourteenth

Amendment’s implications to provide equal treatment for all citizens has only heightened. The

pseudo-liberal demeanor Northern states adopt with respect to racism is just as illusive as it was

fifty years ago. Both in 1974 and today, whites refuse to acknowledge the nation’s deliberate

segregation, breeding a policy of neglect, a policy that has become tradition, a policy that is well

documented across the United States prior to the mid-twentieth century racially divided Detroit. 6

5 Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy
over Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011. p. 84, 86, 154, 135.
Jones, Nathaniel R. “Milliken v. Bradley: Brown’s troubled journey north.” Fordham Law
Review. October 1992. p 51
“Wrong Without Remedy.” New York Times (1923-Current file); Jul 28, 1974; ProQuest
Historical Newspapers: The New York Times. pg. 172.
6
Jones, Nathaniel R. “Milliken v. Bradley: Brown’s troubled journey north.” Fordham Law
 7

Bibliography

Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over
Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011.

“Wrong Without Remedy.” New York Times (1923-Current file); Jul 28, 1974; ProQuest
Historical Newspapers: The New York Times.

Jones, Nathaniel R. “Milliken v. Bradley: Brown’s troubled journey north.” Fordham Law
Review. October 1992. WorldCat database.

Clark, W. A. V. “School Desegregation and White Flight: A Reexamination and Case Study.”
Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles. 1987.

Dierenfield, Bruce J. “The Civil Rights Movement: Revised Edition.” Pearson Education
Limited. 2008.

Review. October 1992. p 54

Baugh, Joyce A. “The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over
Desegregation.” University Press of Kansas. 2011. p. 171.