The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation by Joyce A. Baugh (review)

100 The Michigan Historical Review in shaping labor law, protecting free speech during periods of redbaiting , forging interracial alliances in Detroit’s sociopolitical scene, and representing civil rights and Black Power activists—all of which reverberated locally and nationally. The only section of this work that raises questions is the one related to the role of Goodman and the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) in providing legal support to the Council of Federated Organizations during Freedom Summer. Conflict between the NLG and the NAACP’s legal defense fund is underdeveloped, and the level of NLG legal representation seems overstated. But Goodman and the NLG were clearly among the many northerners who lent their support in the South during the seminal years of the civil rights movement. The lessons in The Color of Law are many and valuable; the book is a virtual “who’s who” of Detroit’s labor and civil rights communities across the twentieth century. Locally, nationally, and to some degree internationally the authors chronicle Goodman and his colleagues’ resilience and their unrelenting efforts in the shifting legal and political climates from the 1930s through the 1970s, as they waged these battles from their law offices in Detroit. Robert Samuel Smith University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Joyce A. Baugh. The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011. Pp. 234. Bibliographical essay. Index. Cloth, $34.95; paper, $17.95. The U.S. Supreme Court’s famous 1954 school-desegregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education, is rightfully considered a landmark in American civil rights law because it struck down the “separate but equal” standard of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had justified racial segregation for more than a half century. It may be, however, that the court’s 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision will become as well known for defining the limits of Brown and—in the eyes of many— exceeding the Plessy standard by permitting the nation’s urban schools to remain separate and unequal. In her new book, The Detroit School Busing Case: Milliken v. Bradley and the Controversy over Desegregation, Joyce Baugh examines how the political and legal battles over the meaning of the Brown ruling arose in Detroit. She also illustrates how Book Reviews 101 the case turned, primarily, on the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation—a distinction that effectively ignored the influence of government policy in the development of racially segregated housing patterns and school-district organization. When federal judges began interpreting the Brown mandate that school segregation end to include busing students across the schooldistrict boundaries that separated increasingly black urban centers from the overwhelmingly white suburbs that surrounded them, passionate responses occurred along the racial divide. Violent racial confrontations began to erupt, most notably in Boston. In Detroit, the public schools had long been segregated in practice, if not by law, and by 1970, when Milliken was filed, the student population was rapidly becoming overwhelmingly black. To a great extent, that trend was the result of a nearly three-decade-long flight by white Detroiters to the burgeoning suburbs on the city’s perimeter; government policies—at all levels—and common discriminatory practices in the private housing market had established and sustained segregated housing patterns that produced segregated schools. But when U.S. District Judge Stephen Roth moved to require cross-district busing that would have sent black Detroit students into suburban schools and white suburban students into Detroit schools, the Supreme Court rejected the idea. Detroit schools were left to integrate themselves, and with an increasingly black student population, this decision ensured that real integration would not be achieved. The suburbs, meanwhile, were absolved of any responsibility for the segregated housing patterns that they had helped to create. Baugh’s book is remarkable for the clarity and precision with which it presents the complexities of the case. Baugh, a professor of political science at Central Michigan University, outlines the legal history of the Plessy and Brown cases as well as the volatile racial atmosphere of the Detroit metropolitan area and the intricacies of the city and suburban state politics on which Milliken is based. That she is...