S11E9: The Containment: Michelle Adams on Northern Jim Crow

S11E9 - The Containment: Michelle Adams on Northern Jim Crow

Andrew: Welcome to the Integrated Schools Podcast. I'm Andrew a White dad from Denver.

Dr. Val: And I'm Val, a Black mom from North Carolina.

Andrew: And this is The Containment: Michelle Adams on Northern Jim Crow.

Dr. Val: Now we're at a unique time. We are recording shortly after the inauguration, and life is moving pretty quickly. And so when you listen to this podcast, just be gentle with us. We don't know what will have happened by the time that you listen to it, but know that we are constantly in conversation about the things that are going on and just trying to make sure that we continue to provide the content that allows you to learn and make choices to support the multiracial future that we all believe in.

Andrew: Absolutely, it feels sometimes harder and harder to imagine getting there, but certainly leaning on community, leaning on conversation, leaning on relationships is an important step to take no matter what's going on in the world. So we are grateful to you all for being here, for tuning in, for listening, and we are grateful to be able to share this really excellent conversation with Michelle Adams, who's been on the podcast before.

Dr. Val: That's right. Okay. So I was not a part of the podcast the first time, can you give us a little context about her first visit?

Andrew: Yes, so Michelle Adams is a constitutional law professor and has focused a lot of time and energy on the Milliken v Bradley case. And Milliken was decided in 1974. So, uh, back in 2019 she came on to commemorate the 45th anniversary of that decision. And now she finally has a book out about the Milliken case. The book is called The Containment. Detroit, the Supreme Court and The Battle for Racial Justice in the North. It's a great book, and we wanted to have her back to, uh, tell us a little more about the case and why she wrote the book and, go deeper on Milliken v Bradley.

Dr. Val: I was an adult when I learned about Milliken v Bradley. And certainly Brown v Board is something that I learned about in school. And so this conversation really is about what happened after Brown V Board that kind of got us to where we are today.

Andrew: Yeah. After Brown v Board, you know we started begrudgingly and slowly moving towards less and less segregation, and Milliken really kind of put a stop to that. Thurgood Marshall was on the court at the time. He said it was gonna be the end of his life's work. He wrote a very powerful dissenting opinion in the case that we’ll include a link to in the show notes. But in it, he has this very famous quote, where he says…

Thurgood Marshall: Our nation, I fear, will be ill served by this court's refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together and understand each other.

Dr. Val: Milliken is also important to Professor Adams because it took place in her hometown and she was able to see firsthand the impacts on her community as a result of the case. And so the book is also a little bit of a homecoming and a love letter to her community.

Andrew: It's a powerful book. It's an easy to digest book. It's a really, I think, important contribution to creating a shared understanding, a shared set of facts about what happened in 1974 that kind of stopped the progress of the promise of Brown v Board.

Dr. Val: One thing that comes up in the conversation that you had here today is de jure versus de facto segregation.

Andrew: Yes. This is the legalese way of saying de jure segregation, which is basically segregation by law. So the law says Black people here, White people there. This is what we think of when we think of the south with Whites only drinking fountains and White schools and Black schools.

And de facto segregation is the idea that it's, it's segregation that is just a fact of nature. It just happens to occur. And so that comes up a lot in the discussion. One of the things that Milliken was looking at was this idea of de facto segregation. And one of the things that Michelle Adams argues in the book and in this episode is that there isn't really such a thing as de facto segregation. That segregation is really the result of government policy everywhere we see it.

Dr. Val: Hmm. Well, we don't wanna give away too much in the intro. Let's take a listen.

[THEME SONG]

Michelle Adams: Hi, I am Michelle Adams and I'm a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School.

Andrew: And you just wrote a book called The Containment. Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. It is finally out in the world. The last time you were on, which was a couple of years ago now, you were working on the book. We are so glad that it is out. It's, it's amazing. It was clearly so much work that went into it, but it is really accessible. I'm not a lawyer. I never went to law school, but was so easy to read, so easy to digest, and tell such an important story. Congratulations. I hope you're proud and excited for it to be in the world.

Michelle Adams: Thank you and thank you for having me on. And what you just said was exactly the intention.

Dr. Val: Awesome.

Michelle Adams: That’s what I spent a lot of time doing, was trying to use, the skill of translation to pivot and take these really kind of complicated legal doctrines, which when you break them down and explain them correctly are not so complicated and make it so that all of us can have an opportunity to understand what the Supreme Court has done and will do and its history, and, and also to wrap that up in a, in a narrative character driven story that I think will be exciting to a lot of readers.

Dr. Val: It's your teacher spirit, and we love teachers on this podcast.

Michelle Adams: So do I.

Andrew: I wanna talk about the case. But first, the other thing I was just struck by in the book is how much of you, yourself, your own story, your parents being born in Detroit as you know, the kids of, of the great migration, you being born in Detroit, your own schooling. Can, can you tell us that story a little bit? Your journey into this and why you felt it was important to include that in the book?

Michelle Adams: Yeah, I'm really happy to do that, and thank you for, for asking me the question. I mean, this has been a very personal project for me. It began just before my mother passed away in 2013. And so she knew about the book and I was able to talk with her about it a little bit, and then she passed. And so part of what was happening for me as I worked through this project was also going through a grief period. And a grief stage of thinking about her and what her life was like. And then my father had passed before that and what his life was like. And so there's part of this book that really is just a love letter to that generation of, of Black folks who brought us here to today.

In terms of my personal story, I was born in 1963 in the city of Detroit. And, I loved the city, but one of the things that my parents did was make, made a choice for me as a very, very young kid to go to a private school in the suburbs. That turned out to be an incredibly formative experience for me. And so I really had two feet, you know, each foot in a different place. I had one foot in the suburbs, going to this very progressive private school. And then I had another foot in the city of Detroit growing up around Black doctors and Black lawyers, and school administrators and nurses. And, you know, every, all the dads I knew went to Meharry and Fisk and

Dr. Val: Mm. Nice.

Michelle Adams: … all the HBCUs and both of my parents went to Howard at one time or another. so that was really, uh, a huge part of my life. And so for me, I, I sort of still have those two feet in those two places. And I think that that has informed a lot of the work that I've done and what I care about in the world and what I care to spend my, my scholarly time on.

And so the beginning of the book is a discussion of that background and of my parents, and then also of an experience I had going to my first sort of Supreme Court oral argument as a young professor and what that felt like and trying to take the reader into the room, feel what that feels like and to get a sense of what was going through my mind and to, and to pivot and allow the reader to think a little bit about, well, so if you knew a little bit about constitutional law and you were here in this august place, what would that feel like? What would that look like?

And then at the end, we come back at the very end of the book and I sort of talk a little bit about all the things we've learned and all the characters we've met along the way, and what an impact that that had on me. And it's emotional, it's personal, and it's something that I am just so blessed to have been able to do this project.

Andrew: Yeah. What does that add? Because I mean, reading the book, I'm just, you know, struck by just how much research went into it. How many original source materials you're citing, how much, you know, like every other line. I'm like, God, that's, there's another document she must have read. There's another, you know, microfiche, she must have unearthed somewhere. There's another, you know, private correspondence between somebody. But you feel your soul throughout the whole thing. Why did it feel like it was important to include that?

Michelle Adams: Well, let me just stop for a minute and just give you a shout out for noticing the amount of research that's in this book.

Dr. Val: Yes. [everyone laughs]

Michelle Adams: I just, maybe we can talk about that for like an hour. Just the, the, you know, I, going into the archives the very first time I went in there and it was just a mind blowing experience. But I would say just about every sentence of this book is researched.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: And it's the media of the time. It's deep dives into the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, the New York Times, magazines, uh, archival sources, obviously the cases and the lower court cases. And then the most beautiful thing is at the NAACP’s, all of their papers are digitized through the Library of Congress. You can, if you wanna know where a lot of those letters came from, when they weren't directly me going to the archival sources, it's just an incredible resource of being able to look at what the NAACP has done over the years.

Now in terms of my voice, and sort of why that was important to me. I've always cared about schools, I've always cared about education. I realized that that was the ability for me to have a, a great education that's made it possible for me to, not just to achieve my goals, but to kinda max out my, my capacity as a person. And I've always had this deep seated feeling that not everyone has had that opportunity. And so for me, the opportunity that education gave me and gave my parents is something that I, I just take so seriously and I want every child to have the same opportunities that I had.

And so as, as I've developed as a constitutional law professor, I've read deeply in those cases and in a bunch of other areas. And so it's always been something that's been very, very important to me. And I think it's just something where I got incredibly interested in it and I kept reading and I kept reading and I kept reading.

Andrew: Yeah. I mean it all, it all shows up in the book. There's so much heart in it. The last time you were on you gave us this, like incredible, eight minute long constitutional law class. If I passed the test, basically the cases that led us to Milliken, which the book is about, we've got, Brown in 1954, says separate is inherently unequal. We've got Brown II a year later says, yeah, but like all deliberate speed, you don't have to do anything about it right now. Takes about a decade before we get to Griffin versus County school Board of Prince Edward County that says the era of all deliberate speed is over. We now actually have to do something about it.

Michelle Adams: You’re talking about Green, I think.

Andrew: Oh, was it Green?

Michelle Adams: Green versus New Kent County.

Andrew: Green versus New Kent County? Thank you. See, I'm not a lawyer.

Dr. Val: See eight minutes. Eight minutes. And the White man's like I'm a lawyer now. [Everyone laughs]

Andrew: Okay, so the Green case says the era of all deliberate speed is over. ‘71 Swan, says you really have to desegregate, even if it means bussing kids around.

Michelle Adams: Correct. The federal district courts have broad, equitable authority to be able to order all that.

Andrew: Right. And then ‘73, you have Keyes that, that, and we, we did a whole series on Keyes here, but basically takes Brown out of the south, says even if you don't have explicit laws that say there are Black schools and White schools, if your schools end up being all Black and all White, you still have an obligation to desegregate.

And then that leads us to Milliken in ‘74. The decision comes down in ‘74, and they've been arguing it at the same time that that Keyes is being argued. But, digging into Milliken, why is it important? Why is it worth writing a book about? Why do you care so much about it?

Michelle Adams: My book is a long argument about why I think that Milliken is where the promise of Brown versus Board of Education ended.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Mmmm, Yeah.

Michelle Adams: And I will say that at the end I say that I don't wanna leave the reader in a completely sort of paralyzed state. And I think there's reasons to be hopeful. For some of the same reasons that you all have been focusing on in your podcast, and this podcast is evidence of that, this organization is evidence of that.

But the one sentence answer as to why I wanted to spend all this time on this book is because Milliken is in effect, where Brown ended. And when we say Brown ended, the promise of Brown, because when you go back to 1954 and you read this case, which is pretty short, easy to understand, written for an actual person to be able to read it and see what it said. There's an opportunity that's, that's in that case to bring our nation together.

Right? And to begin to heal some of these extraordinary wounds that are associated both first with slavery and then with by law segregation. And that possibility is tantalizingly open really until 1974. And the Supreme Court really tries to shut that down in Milliken.

Andrew: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about the lead up to the case. Because I think there's, there's so much in here. Like you said, sort of paying tribute to all of the brilliant legal scholars and community activists and parents and caregivers who were involved leading up to it. One of the themes that comes out of that is this tension between those who wanted integration and those who didn't.

Michelle Adams: I am a passionate integrationist, but wanted to show is that there were all these people who were trying to do something important around education and around getting around the caste system that we have. And they didn't all agree. And it's important to note that. I think at some point I say that, you know, we were all on the same side. We differed on strategy.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: We, we differed in many significant ways that I take very seriously. But sometimes we get tied up in the strategic differences we have, and it just takes a moment to step back and realize that we're all on the same army. Uh, we're all on the same side.

Andrew: Yeah. One of the people who really highlights that is Albert Cleage Junior. Can you tell us about kind of his evolution, from starting out really pretty in favor of integration to leaning much more towards kind of a Black nationalism.

Michelle Adams: Well, Cleage is one of the sort of really interesting figures in a book that has a lot of interesting figures.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: The big takeaway about this guy is he's brilliant. And he cares deeply about Black folk in the Black community. And he is someone who, who experienced firsthand what it felt like to be at the brunt of, of having his opportunities limited.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: And he cares deeply about education. And I think sort of in the early 1960s, I think he thinks, okay, well, integration's on the table. And that's the way to sort of help Blacks be able to have more economic, educational, social opportunities.

But I think things turn, right? And I think things turn for him as they turn for many Black folks over the course of the sixties when they realize that there's gonna be this ferocious backlash from White folks who simply are gonna want to hang on to what we've been doing for all these years. And they don't want to engage in power sharing or resource sharing.

And so his response to that is to say, well, you know, we don't need you. We don't want you, we don't wanna, we don't want to integrate with you. We believe we can, we can run our own schools and run our own bookstores. I mean, so it's, it's not just a sort of Black nationalism as it pertains to education. It, it's as it pertains to sort of a whole host of different parts of life. And, you know, he's not the only one saying it. I mean Malcolm’s saying it right? And he knew Malcolm.

And so, you know, he's Detroit's leading Black nationalist. And one of the things that he is really interested in doing is letting the school board know that they have failed and miseducated Black children. And after you get out of the prologue in the book, it's really that first chapter where you sort of see him come in and take it to the Detroit Board of Education and just let them know how poorly they have undereducated Black children. Everything in the report that he presents them with is true.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: The thing that's ironic is that this school board actually cares, but has inherited just a ton of basically separate and unequal running of the Detroit school system. And so then the question becomes a sort of, what should we do about the fact that the Detroit public school system is systematically under educating and miseducating Black children?

And there's a lot of different ways to think about how to solve that problem. Cleage's position is, give us the schools, let Black parents and Black teachers control them. And if we have Black control, we will solve this problem. And then there's other characters who have a different view.

Dr. Val: You did have a group of White folks in the school board who did care. And there was a lot of tension. And I think what I struggle with just generally is like you see people making attempts and then you see like pressure from folks who are again, are on the same side saying like, you're not doing this fast enough or good enough, or whatever. And so it was just remarkable to me to see that play out, in the story that you shared. I recognize that, and I recognize it's still very much a problem that we face.

Michelle Adams: I think that's right. I mean, I think nobody said politics were going to be not messy. Right?

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: And, and so when you get to the point where you're actually having political conversations and you're actually engaging with folks and you're trying to engage from a position of relative equality. Right. It's not just the school board telling people what's gonna happen, but now folks are saying, this is what we want to have happen. We want to be engaged in actually running the Detroit Public Schools or what, or, or whatever organization we're talking about. That's when things get challenging.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: There's no two ways about that. And this is an extraordinarily challenging moment. And I think that's what I really tried to portray in the book was sort of, I wanted to step back and say, now let's look at what the arguments are and let's explore the motivation of these individuals. Right?

A sort of sub theme of the book is why do people make the choices that they make.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: And one of the conclusions I came to was that they make choices under systems of constraint. Right?

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: So there's a piece in the book talking about like, why, why do White people behave the way they do? In particular, the relationship between White flight and home values and how racism can be capitalized in the value of a home. But if your home is the only thing you've got in terms of wealth building, how would you think about, whether you'd want to sort of…

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: …be against Black incursion. No one's saying that that's morally correct. But what I want to do is talk about all the different ways that people make choices, if only because we can think about, okay, if that's the situation, let's try to create systems and structures that actually create incentives for people to make better choices. And that's, that's the other, I mean, there's many things in the book, but I would like to see coming out of this is let us not try to ask people to behave extraordinarily, let us create systems where it's easy to behave normally and, and do the right thing.

Somebody like, um, Abraham Zwerdling, who was the chair of the Detroit School Board, was basically an integration enthusiast, right? He really, really, really cared, and I try to provide some background on how he got where he got and why he cared about what he cared about. But the, I don't know that we can have the expectation that all White folks are gonna be like that.

Dr. Val: Right.

Michelle Adams: What I think we can try to do is create environments where it's easy to make good choices, and part of what's happening with the book, part of what's happening with the podcast is also to pivot and reach out and try to change people's perceptions and to change the demand side, right?

We want people to demand multiracial education.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: Demand it because we know that we wanna have a multiracial democracy. So, so that's part of the work that I think you all are doing and I think is so important.

Andrew: You have this beautiful Du Bois quote, that kind of gets at this, where, where he says, “other things being equal, the mixed school is the broader more natural basis for the education of all youth. It gives wider contacts, it inspires greater self-confidence and suppresses the inferiority complex. But other things seldom are equal.”

And I think that's the rub where you see this kind of tension within the people who are leading up to the Milliken case is, sure that might be great, but, but things aren't equal. And so how do we go about getting to equal?

Michelle Adams: So there's a reason why there's a huge woodcut of Du Bois in my office.

Andrew: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: Chapter three, is titled after that particular quote that he gave in 1935. And, it's why I will never second guess a Black parent.

We wanna, we wanna create other options and we wanna create demand side, but Black parents are gonna have to make the choices that they need to make, that they think are best for their children. And so, Du Bois has got it exactly right. All things being equal, the mixed school is the better choice, separate apart from what the kids are getting out of it, in part because I think it's very difficult to have a multiracial democracy without it.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: Right. I think we're seeing some of that right now, and it’s very very difficult.

Andrew: Yep.

Michelle Adams: But if that's not possible, and if your children have to go to school where it's hostile, people are being screamed at, they're being spit on. You know, I, I begin the book reminding us of sort of what happened in Little Rock. You're not gonna get a meaningful education, in that scenario, so I get that. I think there's that tension throughout the book, and what I'm trying to say is that I, I see that tension, right? I don't want folks who are integration preferring to be pushed into a corner where they have to deny that they see the tension. The tension is real and the tension is there.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: And what I think we need to do is, is to understand our history so they can make different choices going forward.

Andrew: And create better systems. Yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to look at what happened in Little Rock. It's easy to look at students being spit on having, you know, Coke bottles thrown at them, and say, well, we've come so far, but, but we still have an education system that leaves Black parents with no good choices.

Even in the ways that we have worked towards desegregation, even in the ways that there are, still far too few, but more Black teachers, we still have an education system that leaves Black kids behind, even if they're not getting spit on, even if they're not having Coke bottles thrown at them, that is still not giving them access to advanced curriculum, that is still not holding them to, you know, high expectations, that it's still all these same things that are still going on today.

Michelle Adams: Lack of extracurriculars. Teachers teaching out of their particular credentialization.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: Lack of resources in the institution. There's a whole lot of things that need to be addressed, right? And so we could say, and I think we largely have said, let's just give those schools more money. And that has helped to a certain extent, but then we kind of get to some of the other stuff that we wanna talk about in terms of the role of integration in terms of the creating of the multiracial democracy.

There were a whole lot of Black folks in the 1960s up until sort of the end of the sixties, Black parents who did a tremendous amount of protests, boycotts, freedom Schools, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Seattle, Boston. And who thought that the best way to get access to those resources was that Green follows White.

Dr. Val: Yep.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: You've said a couple of times about the school's role in helping us create a multiracial democracy. The other thing that came up for me, is, is it also the school's responsibility for socioeconomic mobility? Is that also part of what we think the responsibility of schools should be?

Michelle Adams: I do, I do. I think, the question becomes what's, what is the purpose of education in the 21st century? If we go back to Brown, Brown is really interesting because in the mid 20th century, one of the things that the court acknowledged was that at this moment in time, you need an education. It's essential for economic advancement.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: It's essential for citizenship, but it's also essential for economic advancement. You know, the country had moved to a place where it was no longer primarily an agrarian kind of economy, and it had become a much more complex economy. And so clearly education was necessary in terms of people being able to have economic opportunities. And if anything, that's only increased since that time.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: So I think that's a part of what we should be expecting from a package of goods that education is gonna provide. But the other piece of it is just something that, you know, justice Marshall talked about in his descent in Milliken versus Bradley, which is there's no reason to believe that if we don't learn together, that we're gonna be able to live together.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Right.

Michelle Adams: His position was, we will have two nations. And of course he's talking about it just from the perspective of Black/White at that point. That if we do not integrate our schools, that is not likely that we're gonna have a functioning democracy. And, I think that's true.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: I, and I think I asked that question because the Constitution has a glaring hole in it when it comes to a right to education. And so for education to be responsible for making sure we have a multiracial democracy, making sure that people are educated for that social mobility, and then to have that gaping hole in the Constitution, just what has your research led you to believe about why we have that, you know, what weren't they thinking about?

Michelle Adams: Well, our constitution's pretty short.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: It has been amended relatively few times. Most of the amendments have happened, not coincidentally, in periods of significant social mobilization. So, you know, you've got a bunch of amendments that happen after the end of the Civil War, for instance.

And so the way that I talk to my students about this is that the sort of, the general theory of our constitution is that it's a document of negative rights.

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: Which is to say that basically the Constitution in a lot of ways constrains government and it protects the individual against government incursion. What you're talking about in terms of there being an affirmative right to education is very, very different. Right?

And so that's not typically the way we think about the Constitution. It's not really long on, ‘And the federal and state governments and local governments shall guarantee,’ you know, ‘minimum entitlements and shall guarantee a minimum wage.’

Dr. Val: Right.

Michelle Adams: ‘And shall guarantee adequate healthcare.’

There’s none of that in the federal constitution. There's some state constitutions that look a little bit different, but that's not the nature of the document that we have.

What we've done is we've kind of jerry rigged it, right? And it's been the result of social movements. But what has happened is that the Supreme Court over time can then interpret the scope of previous decisions and interpret the scope of some of these, you know, significant amendments like the Equal Protection Clause and, and the 14th Amendment in a way that narrows their ability to provide the kind of protections that you're getting at. And that's a push pull, and for that dynamic, we need to remember that we have to win elections.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Andrew: Let's talk a little bit about the case. The case gets randomly assigned to Judge Roth, another really compelling character in the book. Tell us a little bit about, him and his journey through this. He starts out pretty skeptical, it seems of, the whole thing.

Michelle Adams: This is really interesting. So you get this guy, he's an immigrant, he's from Hungary. He sort of comes to the United States, lives the American dream. He's from Michigan. Comes up through the Democratic party, but the conservative wing of the Democratic party, ends up getting appointed by JFK to be a federal district court judge, which is the trial level judge. And just gets randomly assigned this case one day.

So we talked a little bit about the school board and what happens is, is that Cleage sort of set all this stuff in motion. The school board effectively decides we're gonna try to adopt a really, really limited integration plan. The state of Michigan overturns it and that's when the NAACP gets involved, 'cause the NAACP says that feels sort of southern,

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: the school board wanted to integrate. And then you pass a state law that voids that like. That seems like the kind of thing that they do in the south, and it seems like that violates Brown.

So NAACP sues, it gets randomly assigned to Steven Roth and Roth's like, get outta my courtroom, effectively. He is like, NAACP feels like it's, carpetbaggers, feels like it's people from out of town. At that point, he's not focusing on the fact that the plaintiffs are all Detroiters. And that the Detroit branch of the NAACP is incredibly involved , he's just like, I don't think the schools are segregated. And that's the thing, 1970, there's no signs that say, we shall have segregation in our schools and there’s no signs

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: that say that we're gonna have separate water fountains.

Right. You look around and you don't see it. And so maybe the reasons why the schools are racially identifiable is 'cause just people wanna live in different neighborhoods.

And that's where the judge starts. And what you have in him is a man of his time, but he's a man of his time who listens and who's open to being persuaded by facts.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: And that's the other thing that's so crucial in terms of our current moment, the importance of trying to keep an open mind notwithstanding our, our media environment. And the ability to put aside maybe what your initial thoughts were and to actually allow yourself to be persuaded.

And he did. And the lawyers put on this amazing, amazing trial, and they convinced him that in fact, the segregation in the Detroit schools was intentional.

Andrew: Right

Michelle Adams: And if it was intentional, then it violated the constitution. Just like what was happening down south. Right? So the school authorities intentionally segregated the schools, both the local school authorities and the authorities that are responsible on the state level.

Andrew: For drawing the district lines, for figuring out where, where the district boundaries gonna be.

Michelle Adams: Well, part of the reason is because in Michigan at the time, education is a statewide function. so when an action is taken by the Detroit School Board, the agent of the state of Michigan.

Up through, I think ‘61 or ‘62. You had to go through state approval process to determine where you were gonna put your school. When you, when you had gone through your bonding and you got your money and you were gonna build a brand new school. And this is a period of time where we're actually building a lot of

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: The state basically authorized well said, well, you can put it here, but you can't put it there. And we of course know that the location of the schools is a powerful driver in terms of who's going to be attending those schools, particularly if you then put on top of that a neighborhood school rule,

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: The one other thing I'll say about the amazing trial is it's not just the trial that says, well, what did the Detroit school authorities do? It's a 41 day trial, 10 days of which are on housing.

Andrew: Yeah. This part was fascinating,

Michelle Adams: It's a housing case inside of a school case.

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: And it's a housing case that is about all the ways in which Northern Jim Crow is created, maintained, and prosecuted.

And so the, the trial is a little primer on Northern Jim Crow. And it's those facts that takes a judge who's pretty conservative and is skeptical and turns him into one of the leading proponents of desegregation in the country.

Andrew: Yeah, tell us a little bit about that housing case and kind of some of the arguments we, we had, Richard Rothstein and, and his daughter on the podcast, so, you know, we, we've talked a little bit about his work from the Color of Law, but give the sort of brief overview of the housing case that they presented in, in, Milliken.

Michelle Adams: Let me first give a shout out to Richard's book. I mean, for folks who are really interested in, in sort of going deep on Northern Jim Crow, that is your book,

Andrew: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: The Color of Law, um, and my book's in conversation with his book.

Andrew: For sure.

Michelle Adams: So what's happening in the housing cases? So, if the case had just been, is the state law that voided the integration plan unconstitutional, there wouldn't have been a need for the housing case, 'cause it's just a really narrow case. And the answer to that is likely yes.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: But you know how you get your car to the mechanic and it's like you, it's got a knocking sound. And they're like, once they open up the hood, you

Andrew: Look at all these other things, right?

Michelle Adams: look at, you know, there's some other problems. There's the alternator, the battery. And so that's what happens is this case becomes a much larger case. And it's like we can't just focus on, you know, voiding the integration plan. It's the fact that not with saying the fact that this is a, a liberal school board, the Detroit School Board has been running a separate and unequal school system for a very, very, very long time. And we wanna probe that.

And the only way to be able to probe that in the north, is to talk about housing. Because again, there's no sign, there's no laws, there's no ordinances, like, you've gotta be able to say, okay, this is how it happened.

And what the defendants in Detroit and many other places have been saying, when some of these cases get to the lower courts. They say, Hey, it's not us. Like, Black people are living together in these neighborhoods? Well, we just say that you have to go to the neighborhood school. That's not racist.

Andrew: Right. White people also have to go to their neighborhood schools. This is not discriminatory. Right.

Michelle Adams: And who knows why, why all the Black folks are living in one place and all the White folks, and it's, and it wasn't us.

Andrew: right. We didn't do it.

Michelle Adams: We didn't do it.

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: We're not responsible. We don't sell houses,

Dr. Val: yeah. Something you wrote in the Fences chapter, um, and about how “court ordered desegregation was modest stimulus to White flight at a national level, however. One way to blunt its effect would've been to break White families assumption that there would always be a nearby, non-integrated safe haven to welcome them.”

Can you talk a little bit about the spaces in which, White folks created these safe havens in connection to housing.

Michelle Adams: I guess I would say all of these things that they were talking about in the housing portion of the case. Right. They are endorsed, created, allowed by the law. So racially restrictive covenants. Right? So these are the things that are in the deed of the house, and you wanna go buy the house, and it says that the owner can't sell a house to African Americans or to Jews,

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: So everybody says, oh, well, the Supreme Court struck those down in 1948. Well, that's true, but there was testimony in the Michigan case that a prominent title reporting company kept reporting those in deeds up through like 1968, ‘69, after the Federal Fair Housing Act had been passed.

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: So the title company says, Hey, we, we don't enforce these. But I mean, if they're running with the deed, they obviously still have some effect.

Prior to the New Deal, it was really hard to buy a house.

Dr. Val: Right.

Michelle Adams: And one of the big innovations of the New Deal is it makes it easier for normal, regular, you know, working class and middle class people to buy houses because the federal government's gonna operate in the background as a backstop, in terms of insuring some of these mortgages. The federal government says, yeah, we'll do that, but you have to have racial restrictive covenants in those deeds.

Andrew: Right,

Michelle Adams: Or the Homeowners Loan Corporation. This is redlining, This is a federally created corporation that basically says to a developer that wants to develop in this, in this, what was of Black enclave, you gotta put a wall up between the Black and the White neighborhood. And if you we're not gonna you those federal guarantees.

So there's these different mechanisms, but they're harder to see and they have a relationship to the government.

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: And so all of these things have to be explained and they're explained painstakingly. And the reason, one of the reasons I wrote the book was to have an opportunity to, that story in a way that's really engaging, right?

And so, long answer to your question, which is to say it, those things didn't stop,

Dr. Val: Right,

Michelle Adams: right? Maybe they slowed down, but then what took over was exclusionary zoning, and some of the other things that made it quite difficult for people like my parents to move to the suburbs.

And so, White folks, folks knew that if there was gonna be a Detroit only desegregation plan, all they had to do is move across the eight mile line and they wouldn't have to participate in that plan and it’d be very difficult for Black folks to, to follow.

And in 1970, that was the case.

Andrew: right,

Michelle Adams: So there's also testimony in the, the trial about that. And I sort of talk about that in the book.

So, so I think someone coming to this and reading it, I want through the same process that Judge Roth went through.

Andrew: right.

Michelle Adams: Come with me through this trial. These lawyers are storytellers. Come and watch what happened.

Dr. Val: Yeah. and

Michelle Adams: See what you think and see whether that changes your view about Northern segregation. Right. And the end of the story is just that we had a nationwide system of Jim Crow.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: It had regional variations, significant regional variations. No, no doubt.

Dr. Val: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: But the idea that what we were doing up here was just somehow, you know, de facto, by chance, who knows? That's not true.

Andrew: This is what you're saying. There is no such thing as de facto segregation. And this is the realization that it seems like Judge Roth came to over the course of this very compelling testimony was that, it isn't just sort of a fact of nature that we have segregated living. We have segregated living because of explicit policies either, you know, explicitly done by the federal government or endorsed by the federal government.

And so if there isn't de facto segregation, if all segregation is in fact created by the government, then it's the government's obligation to do something about it.

Michelle Adams: Perfect. Now we just have this one extra thing, which is to say, so now the school authorities can't say, the neighborhood school rule is completely racially neutral.

Dr. Val: right.

Michelle Adams: It takes that argument away from the defendants. Because now suddenly if all that underlying segregation is the product of, of government action, and you knew about it.

Dr. Val: right. Right.

Michelle Adams: And then you incorporated it into the school rules. Well, it's really hard to then turn around and say, there's no by law segregation in the schools. Right.

And that. really what I think the lawyers did so beautifully in the first part of the case. And then the end part of the case is just all the different things that happened in the city of Detroit that are very, very similar to what happened in schools in the West and the north.

Andrew: right,

Michelle Adams: And there's just like a greatest hits you know, sort of, it looked a little bit different in different places, but it's the same stuff. You know, letting White folks transfer out of Black schools, and make exceptions to the neighborhood school rule, the neighborhood school rule, building schools in the center of Black neighborhoods or the center of White neighborhoods to, to ensure that they were segregated, feeder patterns, so we're feed the Black kids into the Black schools and we're gonna feed the White kids into the White schools.

These are the basic kind of building blocks of how we segregate the schools in the north.

Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's the Keyes story as well. The Black population in Denver starts moving out of Five Points where they have been forced to live and, as they move the school district starts redrawing boundaries, starts creating special transportation zones, and then it is ultimately the building of this school, Barrett Elementary, that triggers Rachel B Knoll to get involved in, in schools and run for the school board.

And, I'm reading your account of Detroit is like, oh yeah. this is, this is Denver's story all over again.

Michelle Adams: I give you an A, give you an A.

Dr. Val: I was watching your body language as you talked about the playbook and just how you are just like, I'm just so annoyed with this playbook. I can see it everywhere. Um, and, at the very end, because we like to leave people with some hope, and at the very end, one thing that you mention is that we can do more than what the law minimally requires. Right. So can you talk a little bit about a possible new playbook or doing more than the minimum that, that the law requires?

Michelle Adams: First part of the playbook is we need to be on the same page with respect to the facts.It's gonna take thousands of us. My, my humble contribution is putting us all in the same factual scenario in a package that I think is easy to read and, and enjoyable to read and will be enlightening right? That is my contribution. That must be the first thing.

Second, we must demand that our children go to school together, knowing that if they don't, we aren't going to be able to have a successful democracy.

Andrew: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: And in particular with White parents, getting them to understand that like an all White school environment is giving their students something less than they need and deserve.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: Because maybe we think it works, but it doesn't work.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: And then, all of the things that we're doing to bring people together in one place to then think about what are, what are our best practices and being able to join. If you look at some of the stuff in the book that happened in the seventies, what you started to have, and one of the tragedies of Milliken was that you had, Black parents and White parents beginning to organize together

Andrew: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: to make multi-district, desegregation work. And then, once the Supremes say, oh no, this is, you don't have to do this, it sort of cuts their knees out from under them, essentially.

Andrew: Right,

Michelle Adams: So I, I guess what I would say on, on the optimism is keep doing what we're doing, and some of the things then become federal and they, they're gonna require us to have some control of the federal government.

Another piece of this is housing. It's not just that we need to have integrated schools, it's that we need to have integrated neighborhoods. And part of the reason we don't is because the cost of housing is so high. I think housing affordability and housing supply and the importance of increasing housing supply actually to this fundamental issue, right.

I think it is a housing issue. I think it's a school issue. I think it's a democracy issue but I I haven't given up. And you'll see the very last page. I think it's not too late. And, there are many people around the country who are working on this.

Dr. Val: And I think your, your list, your playbook, leaves room for so many in the Soul Force. So if you aren't necessarily passionate about education, but any of those things will help us to reach this goal.

Michelle Adams: I agree.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: When you were on last time, the book's original title I think was Soul Force. And Soul Force comes from this this beautiful Dr. King quote. About the need to rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

Which is, which is beautiful, but it, it feels like you have kind of taken it a step further not just talking about an individual's soul force, but really turning it into a coalition, that people can sign up and join the Soul Force.

Michelle Adams: Not I about I'm not about to, to step on Dr. King. I mean, I think that was Dr. King's vision, right? So I think part of what's happening in that, in that speech at the march on Washington is, he is suggesting to Black folks not to respond violently when they had every right to do

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: But he's also saying that, you know, some White folks have understood that their destiny is born up with ours. And one of the things I really wanted to do in the book was to have characters, to have narratives, but also sometimes we need to have some heroes.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: You know, we've got some villains, but we need to have some heroes and we need to have people when you pick up the book and read it and say, you know, I wanna do that, I wanna be like that.

Andrew: Right.

Michelle Adams: I can do that. Right. So that's part, that answers part of the question in terms of sort of what can we do now.

Andrew: The book is now called The Containment because it is about the ways in which the state worked to contain Black people in Detroit. This leads to the segregation wall that you talk about. This sort of half mile long six foot high wall that was built in order for a developer to be allowed to build close to a Black neighborhood. as part of the containment, that now has beautiful murals on the Black side and, and is a bland wall on the White side is still there today. You close the book by, by going back and visiting it.

Why did you move from Soul Force to Containment? And Soul Force is still like, very clearly a big piece of the book and shows up throughout. But, why from Soul Force to The Containment?

Michelle Adams: I think because the housing case was so amazing and it was so much about the containment, but also because when you look at the briefs and you look at the oral arguments that were made first at the trial court level, the sixth circuit, which is the intermediate appellate level, and then the Supreme Court, the containment theme was always there and the Supreme Court basically chose not to, engage with it.

Andrew: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: And I I think it also is a handy label for understanding what happened in terms of Northern Jim Crow. And I think as I got through the book I realized that my book's about a lot of things, but it's also about Northern Jim Crow and how, how Northern Jim Crow was created, maintained, and prosecuted.

And so I wanted to put that up front. But the Soul Force piece has never, has never lo, has never left, and as you suggested, it's still there.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: In the epilogue, you describe the Soul Force beautifully. If I may read a little bit of that. It makes me a little emotional and you, you go back to this wall that you hadn't noticed. You write,

“The wall provided new insight. All Black folk had to find a way to cope with what it represented. The tools of the trade were mini humor, style, art, music, fashion, erudition, audacious and never ending displays of Black excellence. Some chose to go over the wall, some chose to burrow under it. Some chose to go around it, but it wasn't gonna stop us.”

Michelle Adams: The piece that you just read. I mean, to me, that's the essence of sort of what it was to grow up in a Black community.

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: And that's me honoring the people that I came from, and the culture to which I belong to. All the different ways that we're different.You know, there's, there's no such thing as the Black community, but there's so many different ways that are in this world. We stayed in this world.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: We're fighting to, for our place in this world. And that has never stopped.

Andrew: How did you, and how do you still cope with what that wall represents?

Michelle Adams: This is the work.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: It's today. It's talking to you.

Andrew: Yeah.

Michelle Adams: Right. It's having an opportunity to go out and have conversations I mean, the journey was the destination,

Dr. Val: Hmm.

Michelle Adams: right? My offering, as I said before, is this work. And, each of us is one person and we can do the thing that one person can do. But I've been so moved thinking about my mother and her elegance and all the different things that I saw, like all the different ways in which the Black folks in my world were moving through it.

Obviously the containment is, it's physical, but it's also metaphorical.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Adams: And, I now look back and I have this appreciation for that generation. And I, as I said before, it's a love letter to them. It's a love letter to the Black community in it's many, many, many myriad forms. And, and with our disagreements and our unity and all the rest, it is a love letter.

So when I think about it from that perspective, that's how I got around it. And that's what it means to me. And, and I will continue to go out and, and, and do this work.

Dr. Val: I was just really inspired by that because I think for me it provided a real visual of how this looks and what we can do to overcome it. So thank you.

Michelle Adams: I can't thank you enough for, for really spending the time with the book and to give me this critical feedback on it. You know, you go and you work for so long, and, to be able now to have you both have taken your precious time, to read this book and engage with it. I, I, I really appreciate it.

Andrew: It, it's a, it's a beau It's a beautiful book. I hope everyone will go out and get it and read it. It is, like I said, so easy to read and so compelling. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for all of your time. Thank you for your support for coming back on the podcast. It's just, yeah, it's really always a treat to be in conversation with you.

Michelle Adams: Yeah, it, uh, it's wonderful. Thank you again,

Dr. Val: Thank you.

[THEME MUSIC]

Andrew: so, Val, what'd you think?

Dr. Val: I think I wanna start with the idea that Brown was the opportunity to bring our nation together.

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Val: It was a legal remedy to a problem that was created hundreds of years before that.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: And at the time, it felt like we had just enough will as a country, to get it done. I'm living in a space right now where I am recognizing , that a margin of error that, that we have. So while there, there was probably like half the country easily who were like, yeah, we're celebrating the fact that we are moving in this direction, there was a, a another part of the country that was probably devastated about the idea that we were moving toward bringing the nation together by bringing our young people together.

Andrew: Yeah.

Dr. Val: And I think that feels super relevant right now, just given we seem to be in the same space in terms of a nation that is divided on ideology, on how we should treat our neighbors, what schools should teach, how young people should be together.

And so I. I think in some ways it settles me,

Andrew: Hmm.

Dr. Val: um, because this is not the first go at it.

Andrew: This fight is not new, but it is part of this ongoing struggle, yeah.

Dr. Val: Right. And there, apparently is a lot of work to be done to still bring our country together around some things that we, you and I, fundamentally agree, are important, which is just being together and figuring out how to create the best opportunities for our children despite their zip codes, their income levels.

So I am thankful that we have examples of legal remedies that work to bring our country together. And I am recognizing and feeling very closely now that with Milliken, there are also folks who are, who said, no, we need another, legal remedy to stop that progress.

Andrew: I love that idea that you said about kind of like the, the margins. The margins are really narrow, you know, it's one election, it's Richard Nixon and like one more Supreme Court justice appointed that leads to the Milliken decision that that that kind of stops this progress.

And, even the Brown V Board decision, you get Brown II a year later, which basically says, don't do anything about this anytime soon. And so it's always been kind of fits and starts and forward progress and then retrenchment and backlash and, and so yeah, there is something somewhat comforting in feeling like we are very much in a backlash time right now, that this is not the first backlash.

But, it also highlights for me, the importance of being involved, of, of elections. We think about kind of the short term consequences of elections, but what are the ripples generations later that came from an election in the seventies, that we are still grappling with, that we are still trying to undo the harm that was done in that.

Dr. Val: Yeah, I, I thank you for saying that 'cause that, now I'm gonna think of it. This is always like a one point game. This is always a buzzer beater type energy. Like we can't ever rest in thinking we have the game in the bag and it's done.

I mourn a lot of things when I think about like historical inequities, current inequities, but I think what I mourn the most is the progress that we could have made. Like when you imagine where we could be at this point. Just imagine where we would be as a country had we not stopped what Brown tried to do almost immediately.

You know, Professor Adams' parents a decision,right? And the tension right? I mean, I chose public schools for my children, partly because of affordability,

Andrew: Yep.

Dr. Val: but also as a public school teacher. I knew that in our schools, young people could get high quality education. And research shows that you are equally likely to have an outstanding teacher, a poor teacher, or a mid teacher at any school that you go to.

Andrew: It makes me think of that Du Bois quote that, all things being equal, the best opportunity, the best thing for our country, the best thing for kids individually is an education where we are all together. That is, you know, as Thurgood Marshall said, that that is our kids learning together so that we can learn to live together and all things are not always equal.

One of the things that makes me sad about the Milliken case is that it feels like it put an end to this progress towards a vision where all things could be equal. And so we could rely on that kind of best case scenario, which was being educated together. And, the ways that the containment was kind of reified by the Milliken case, that allowed us to stay separate, to stay apart from each other, that, you know, allowed White flight to result in more segregated schools, made it so that all things were not equal.

Dr. Val: Something that I loved about the book is that Professor Adams did an amazing job profiling such a unique cast of characters that she has lovingly named the Soul Force, right? Folks who were working, in their own ways, sometime in opposition to one another, even though they were on the same side, to make sure that the young people of Detroit had the highest quality education that they could receive.

And this group, as imperfect as they were included Black folks who said, Hey, Black folks should be in charge of Black children's education because we trust what we will give our students. We will love on them. We will make sure that they are provided the education they need. It was White folks who were imperfect allies, but were allies nonetheless, and trying to figure out like, how do we make this right?

There was the tension between how fast progress happened and the decisions that were being made. It was, and it feels like a very human story, and connected to what we see today. Right?

I think sometimes we get into that same battle where there is gonna be a different philosophy. There's gonna be a different strategy about how we get things done. And I think we have to be really careful about leaving space for all of those ideas to surface so that we can come together for the best idea.

Like I think that is the power of diverse thought, right? We know that we all have the same goal and all of our different strategies, they are informed by probably our experiences,

Andrew: Our parents' experiences, our neighbor's experiences.

Dr. Val: Exactly. And so we, we have a limited view of the world. And so having these diverse thoughts of how we get things done, I think it's gonna be important because it's not gonna be one way for every city, for every community, right? We have to be open to learning and listening. I think that's the kind of energy we have to have if we're gonna win this multiracial democracy that we're fighting for.

Andrew: Yeah, and I think the idea of the Soul force is, is what gives me hope from the book, because the Soul Force needs everybody and everybody can join the Soul Force.

What the activism that led to the Milliken case in the first place was about, what this generation of leaders that the book is really a love letter to, what I take from them is the importance of coming together and, joining in the Soul Force and working together to, figure out what's next, to figure out how we make the world a better place, to figure out how we get towards the multiracial democracy that we want.

Dr. Val: Yeah,

Andrew: As Professor Adams said, like one person can only do what one person can do. Her offering is this book. Everybody has something that they can offer to the Soul Force.

Dr. Val: Everyone has something to offer and it doesn't have to look the same. Right. It starts like in, in the individual decisions we make, it continues in the relationships that we build. For just sustainability reasons, it can't be all consuming.

Andrew: Right.

Dr. Val: Don't want people to misunderstand me, right? Like we always need to be clear-eyed about what we're doing. However, you might not be able to attend every protest. You might not be able to donate to every organization. You might have to just prioritize a few, but know that if we are all prioritizing a few, then we can get some things done.

Andrew: Yes. Which leads us perfectly to our next episode with Omkari Williams, who wrote a book called Micro Activism, uh, that really speaks to that directly. So definitely tune in two weeks from now.

And that book, Micro Activism, is the next Integrated School's book club pick. So, if you head over to the website integratedschools.org/bookclub, you can see details about that, sign up for a session. Really great small group facilitated conversations, about the book, and she'll be on in a couple weeks, so you can listen to that before those sessions, which happen at the end of February and the beginning of March.

Dr. Val: Thank you all again for being a part of this community. It means a lot. It would also mean a lot if you choose to share some of your dollars with us as donors to this work. Please visit our website at integratedschools.org and click the donate button, I think it is, unlimited clicks on that button,which would be awesome.You can also join our Patreon for additional content and have an opportunity to hang out with Andrew and I occasionally. And for our Apple listeners, please join us on IS plus, you can subscribe directly from the app.

Andrew: That's right. We’d be grateful for your support. Share this episode. post it in your Facebook parent groups. Send it out to the group chat. Find out how friends of yours want to be part of the Soul Force. What work are they doing?

And then let us know. Send us a voicemail speakpipe.com/integratedschools or go to that website integratedschools.org and click leave us a voicemail button, and we want to hear how you're thinking about being a part of the soul Force, how you're thinking about building relationships and staying together in these times that are trying to divide us. We want to hear from you.

One person can only do what one person can do, Val, but certainly one offering that we each make here is coming together every couple of weeks to be in conversation about these important topics, and it is always a treat for me.

So I'm grateful to be in this with you as I try to know better and do better.

Dr. Val: Until next time.