Throughline - Milliken v. Bradley

Episode Date: July 25, 2019

After the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, public schools across the country were supposed to become more integrated, but by the 1970s, many weren't. As a way to remedy segregation in their city, the Detroit school board introduced busing across Detroit. But the plan was met with so much resistance that the issue eventually led all the way to the Supreme Court.This week, segregation in Detroit public schools and the impact of a Supreme Court case that went far beyond that city.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. We'll hear arguments next in numbers 73, 434, 35, 36, Milliken against Bradley. From our point of view, the unique aspect of this case is that an extensive inter-district remedy is contemplated, almost certainly including busing. The issue, the busing issue that has Americans in an uproar, pro and con, across the country is perhaps nowhere more dramatically present than here in Michigan.

I'm very, very frightened about what's going to happen to our kids. There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR, where we go back in time to understand the present. Hey, I'm Ramtin Arablui. I'm Rand Abdel-Fattah. And on this moment from the first Democratic debate earlier this year. I do not believe you are a racist. And I agree with you when you commit yourself to the importance of finding common ground.

Democratic Senator Kamala Harris called out fellow candidate Joe Biden for once being against the idea of busing as a remedy for school segregation. Vice President Biden, do you agree today, do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree? I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That's what I opposed.

In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that states could not segregate public schools based on race. But by the 1970s, in many parts of the country, schools remained segregated. And that's where busing comes in. It was an attempt to do the job that Brown v. Board was supposed to have done. The basic idea behind busing was that Black students would be bused to white schools, and in some cases, white students to Black schools. Around the time Kamala Harris was bused to school, almost 40 percent of public school students around the country were taking buses to

school. So, you know, it's not like busing, using buses to transport kids is a new concept. It becomes a controversy when we talk about using it to try to end segregation in public schools. This is Joyce Ba. Oh, okay. I am a professor emerita of political science and public administration at Central Michigan University. This idea to use busing as a way to integrate schools sparked heated debates across the country and led to another Supreme Court case that forever changed the conversation about school segregation in the U.S. And the story of that case begins in the 1940s in Detroit, Michigan. On the Detroit River, there is a city with a worldwide reputation for making automobiles. When we look back in the 40s, if you remember, Detroit was sort of the arsenal of democracy,

the boomtown. This is industrial America at war, the arsenal of democracy, the boomtown. This is industrial America at war. The arsenal of democracy delivering the goods. That's where, you know, the auto manufacturers reconfigure their plants to make a lot of the war equipment for World War II. Where automobile fenders once were made, aircraft propellers are turned out by the thousands. You had lots of employment. You had migration of both Southern blacks and Southern whites coming up to Detroit to work in the factories. You know, lots of people were able to work their way up from poverty into the working class, at least,

and for some, into the middle class. This city could be New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, or Louisville. This happens to be our fifth largest city, Midwestern and mighty Detroit. And then after the war, what we begin to see then is these auto companies and their related industries are moving out of the city of Detroit. And they're moving into the suburbs. And when they move, they're taking, you know, hundreds of thousands of jobs with them.

When the jobs left Detroit for the suburbs in the 1950s, so did the people. Federal Housing Administration and VA loan programs helped people buy these suburban homes. Well, some people. And it's at this point then that you had middle class and working class whites beginning to move out. And they could move out because they could take advantage of the FHA loans and the VA loans. Black folks who were trying to move out were resisted. And I think the main factor is the redlining. Okay, redlining. It's one of those words that seems to be everywhere, but can be hard to wrap your head around.

I'll try to break it down. So if you were trying to buy a house, you were less likely to get a loan if you lived in a high-risk neighborhood. What made a high-risk neighborhood? That was determined by lenders tasked with giving out low-interest loans. And there was a clear trend. Black neighborhoods were classified as high-risk, white neighborhoods, low-risk risk. Those high risk neighborhoods were marked with a red line. So as more and more white people received loans and moved to the burbs, more and more black people were denied loans and stayed in Detroit. So by the time we get into the 60s, what we're seeing is a city that is becoming poorer and blacker.

And so we've got then sort of this powder keg that's really waiting to happen. When Black families did manage to get alone and move into a white neighborhood, they were often met with violence. There was one family that moved into a neighborhood. The neighbors threw poisonous snakes in the basement of this family to try to get them to move. And they ultimately did move. The housing segregation that developed in Detroit in the 1950s and 60s was no accident. And it's this housing segregation that created school segregation. Exactly. If you have neighborhood schools, you're going to have school segregation. Local and state school officials

perpetuated these patterns through gerrymandered school zones. How are you going to draw those lines? Where are you going to draw? You draw them in ways that maintain those separations between the black and white schools. School transfer policies. When they were about to change schools so that a school that was mixed would be on its way to becoming majority black, they would permit white students to transfer out of those schools. The tipping point was generally 40 to 50 percent. This is Judge Nathaniel Jones.

Jones is the former lead counsel for the NAACP. And when a school became 40 or 50 percent Black, the white students could option to go to a school that was less integrated. And that accelerated the segregation of the schools because that made the black schools blacker and the white schools whiter. The differences between black and white schools were stark. White schools got more funding, nicer buildings, newer books, better teachers. You know, black children were being told that, you know, they shouldn't go to college. You know, they were encouraged to only go on the vocational education, all of those kinds of things. A lot of Black parents were fed up. Parents like Verda Bradley. She had, I think,

been born and reared in Tennessee. You know, so she grew up in segregation and she comes to Detroit and assumes, of course, that things were going to be different here. But what she began to see was that the schools in Detroit, the Black schools, were not getting the resources that other schools were getting. Verda Bradley had a six-year-old son named Ronald, and she was especially upset by how overcrowded his class was. So Verda and a group of parents, including some white allies, decided to organize. They realized the only way for their children to get the same quality education as white children was to integrate the schools. So basically what happens is the Detroit school

board becomes pro-integration. There's a slight majority that's pro-integration. The school board then encourages the superintendent of schools, who also was pro-integration, to come up with a plan that would begin a slow process of desegregation. It was a very, very limited, very modest plan that would desegregate 11 of the city's 22 high schools. This was called the April 7th plan because the board meeting to approve the plan took place on April 7th, 1970. The plan called for two-way integration across Detroit so black kids would be sent out to white schools and white kids would be sent out to white schools and white kids would

be sent to black schools. This was the first attempt at two-way integration in the district's history. And they were going to do it with busing. Had that idea been proposed or implemented anywhere else in the country by this point? Yeah, this is becoming an issue. Many of the Negro parents believe that a predominantly Negro school, you know, this is becoming an issue. Many of the Negro parents believe that a predominantly Negro school... You know, this is becoming an issue in Boston. We here in Boston do not believe that premise. As a community, it's tearing them apart. They may say this is helping, it's tearing them apart.

I'm not for all this, I don't care, my one will not go to school, but it's tearing them apart. And, you know, other places, yes. No, we won't bust! No, we won't bust! I still see it as a denial of my constitutional right. I want to retain my freedom of association, my freedom of choice. There was intense opposition to the plan. White folks just absolutely went bonkers

because they did not want their children to have to go to school with black kids. I don't approve of busing for a racial balance on any for any reason. We won't bus! No! Despite the outcry, back in Detroit, the school board passed the April 7th plan. But then the state legislature rejected it, and the Michigan governor, William Milliken, signed the repeal. That's when Jones got involved. As lead counsel for the NAACP at the time, Jones believed that at this point, he had no choice but to file a lawsuit. They end up filing a suit in the federal district court for the Eastern District Court of Michigan to desegregate the Detroit public schools on a system-wide basis. The plaintiffs are the students and parents in the Detroit public school system.

The defendants were Governor Milliken, the Detroit School Board, the State Superintendent of Education, and the State Board of Education. And so begins the case of Milliken v. Bradley. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. In the summer of 1970, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against the state of Michigan, representing a group of parents and students in Detroit. And they used a two-pronged strategy to argue their case. First, they focused on the housing segregation and the connection between housing segregation and school segregation, arguing that, you know, they were so commingled, you could not separate the two. So they focused on the actions then that the government

had done in terms of creating housing segregation patterns, and then the decisions made by real estate, the real estate industry, and so forth. That was the first part of the trial. The second phase of the trial, they focused specifically on the decisions by the Detroit Board of Education over the years and the state of Michigan over the years in creating and perpetuating segregation in the Detroit public school system, system-wide. And the judge overseeing this case, this debate that's happening in court, is Judge Stephen Roth. What was his background? Judge Roth had actually been the Michigan Attorney General, and he had served as a circuit judge in Genesee County, which is the county where Flynn is located.

He was active in the conservative blue collar wing of the Michigan Democratic Party at that time. And he had been appointed then to the federal bench in 1962 by John Kennedy, by JFK. And so initially, what was his reaction to the NAACP's argument? Not very positive. When they first initiated the case and you had the initial hearings on various motions. Judge Roth basically told them that he didn't see any way that they were going to be able to prove their case. And in fact, he was basically going to not even hear the case. And it was the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals that told him that you have to hear this case. You have to allow this case to go forward. Wow. So he didn't even want to. He wanted to stop it in its tracks. Yeah, basically.

So the trial starts, I'm guessing, and then Roth has to hear the NAACP's argument and the state's argument. And I know court cases can be complex and drawn out, but was there a kind of key moment in the case? The one that I really focused on what everybody seemed to term as the map, MAP map. During the course of the trial, we had a large map on the wall that's in the courtroom. And we had overlays to that map

for every five years, which showed the shifts in housing policies in neighborhoods. The NAACP attorneys had as part of their trial team an urban planner who put together a 10 by 20 foot map of the city of Detroit. It was a color-coded map that showed how segregated the city was. And it just made it so stark that you could see that there were areas that were all white and areas that were all black. And they did this over several decades. I think they started in 1940, and then 1950, and 1960, 1970, and showed how every decade, even as the population shifted in the city of Detroit, the boundary lines between black and white communities were always there. The high school boundaries always matched the housing boundaries.

One of the trial attorneys in the case said that they deliberately put the map out to the side of Judge Roth. They didn't put it in front of him, but they put it out to the side so that every time he would turn his head, you know, when he was thinking about how to respond to one of the attorney's motions or whatever, he would see that map day after day after day after day over a 41-day trial. And as Judge Roth was sitting on the bench, he'd look at that map with the different overlays, and he would ask the school board lawyers, he said, look at that map.

He said, what else could have caused those shifts in population except race. 10 by 20 feet, that's huge. Yeah, you can't look past it. And I can't find a map. What's so fascinating to me? Really? I would ask people, where is the map? Nobody seems to know what happened to that map. How does a 10 by 20 map disappear?

I don't know. It's torn into pieces. You might be able to find a small piece. So there's this huge map sitting in the room in this trial. The trial goes on for 41 days. It ends. And I'm guessing there has to be a period where the judge has to go off and make his decision. So I want to get a sense.

What's the situation like around the case? I'm sure people know what's happening. Well, it's pretty intense because not only do you have the Detroit case, you also have the desegregation in the Pontiac case, Pontiac, Michigan, right? Yeah. Suburban Detroit. And about the time that Judge Roth is making his decision on the Detroit case, the Pontiac case is coming to the fore. And Judge Damon Keith has ordered that the Pontiac schools be desegregated because he has found that school board decisions that were made created and perpetuated the segregation there. And so what begins to happen is there are groups in suburban Detroit around Pontiac, around Warren, Michigan.

You know, they're anti-busing groups, they're anti-school deseg groups. They hold a rally. The marchers, more than 4,000 of them, gathered downtown and moved through the streets to Madison Junior High School, where the call for a boycott of the busing plan was loud and clear, and the response was clearly affirmative. Okay, tomorrow morning,

when the buses roll from La Ferry Elementary, my daughter will not be on that bus. She will not be in a parochial school. She will be home. All right! And who is the keynote speaker in addition to the woman who's heading up that group? None other than George Wallace,

segregationist governor of Alabama. And then in August of that year, late August, as they're preparing for the schools in Pontiac to be desegregated, some local KKK members blow up 10 school buses in the school bus parking lot. Full-on explosion. Set them on fire. Full-on explosion. Yes.

Full-on explosion. And in Pontiac, Michigan, where 10 school buses were dynamited last week, the tensions are growing by the hour. ABC's Jim Kincaid has a report from Pontiac. These Pontiac, Michigan school buses are scheduled to roll tomorrow morning, not simply to take children to school, but to affect integration in Pontiac schools by carrying children of one race to schools predominantly attended by children of the other. All of this is happening around the time that the trial ends. Judge Roth is now has to return and give a ruling. And I mean, we talked about how at the beginning of the case, it was very clear where he stood on this. And given the political climate and his earlier

opinions, I'm assuming most people thought they knew how he was going to rule. You know, I'm not so sure about that because I think people began to see that he was becoming less permissive of some of the motions from the state, and he was becoming quite skeptical of the arguments being put forward by the defendants in the case. And so I think that people were beginning to wonder, and I think there was some idea that, you know, perhaps Judge Roth was actually going to rule in favor of the plaintiffs in this case. How does he ultimately rule? was in fact unconstitutionally segregated. And he said it was segregated because both housing segregation contributed to this and the specific policies and practices of the school board and the state officials created it. He basically landed on a metropolitan remedy. He said, look, I'm looking at the demographics in the Detroit public schools right now. And at this point,

70% of the students in the Detroit public schools are African American. If I include only the Detroit public schools, I'm not going to have any meaningful desegregation because I'm just going to be moving black kids from one school to another. So he says, I think we have to have a metropolitan-wide remedy. What was the reaction, both the public reaction and the state's reaction, immediately to Judge Roth's ruling. It really was awful. Judge Roth became subject to death threats. There were bumper stickers, Roth as a child molester, Roth as a four-letter word. You know, it got so bad that federal marshals had to be brought in to protect him and his family.

So real, real danger. I mean, it turns very hostile. Yes, yes. No, very, very hostile. And so what's the state's next legal move? and the school board, after the Sixth Circuit Bonk decision, they immediately file an appeal to the Supreme Court, to the U.S. Supreme Court. We kind of know what the main counter-argument is, but what's their main line of argument? What they were arguing is that the suburban school districts should not be involved because they didn't take any actions to segregate their schools. So they basically argued that the suburbs were innocent, that these were innocent victims,

and these people deserved their rights to be protected as well, and they moved to the suburbs so that their children could get a good education, and they shouldn't have to have their kids stuck with being involved as part of this remedy when they didn't have anything to do with it. So it's essentially, we didn't cause this. It's not our fault. We're being punished for something. It's like almost a collective punishment kind of argument that we're being collectively punished. Exactly. Around this time, what was the nation trending towards in terms of its attitudes towards busing?

Moving in the direction of being opposed. And Nixon, President Nixon, was telling his staff members, his administration officials, to be very clear in announcing his administration's opposition to busing as a means for school desegregation. I do not believe that busing to achieve racial balance is in the interest of better education. Where it is the jury, we comply with the court. Where it is de facto, until the court speaks, that still remains my view. In a moment, the Supreme Court decides the fate of busing in America. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. So now the stage was set.

The trial was over. The nine Supreme Court justices had come to their decision, and Nathaniel Jones was there, back in the courtroom, waiting to hear the verdict. We were optimistic because the Sixth Circuit that had heard the case, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, affirmed that decision and that remedy. But so we thought, as we were counting noses on the Supreme Court, we felt that we had a good chance to prevail. So what did they decide? The Supreme Court basically says, yes, there's unconstitutional segregation of the Detroit public schools.

So, yes, there was a violation of constitutional rights. But you can't have a metropolitan remedy unless you have specific evidence that the suburban school districts made racially discriminatory policies. Well, I was stunned by that decision. We were sitting in the courtroom on that Wednesday morning when the justices took the bench, and Chief Justice Berger began by reading his opinion from the bench. And we looked at each other and we said, you know, that doesn't sound like our case. He was making statements that were just totally at odds with what the evidence showed.

In many respects, this was disingenuous on the part of the court. Chief Justice Berger wrote the opinion. It was a 5-4 case. Because there was such rigid housing segregation in the suburbs, there were few black students in those schools. So there was no reason for those suburban school districts to actually pass any policies to segregate. There were no students to segregate. There was no need for the policies. And does this, I mean, inherently overlook the sort of connection to housing segregation that influenced Judge Roth's decision? Exactly. They refused to examine and utilize any of the findings about housing segregation.

They focused only on the decisions of the school board and the state officials and basically said you can't have a metropolitan remedy. I mean, they just basically ignored all that evidence. If the mere existence of racial disparities between separate, distinct, and unrelated school districts does not offend the Constitution, and we submit it does not, then there is absolutely no basis upon which a multi-district remedy can be predicated in this case. Let me say this, you will search this record in vain to find one width, one jot of evidentiary material that any suburban school district committed any day jury act of segregation either by itself in complicity with the state or complicity with anyone else.

There is no such evidence. The educational landscape in this country would have been changed dramatically if the Milligan case had been decided differently. If we could have got that one more vote, the whole landscape of public education would have changed and we would not be faced with what we're facing now. For these reasons, the Detroit-only plan simply has no hope of achieving actual desegregation.

Under such a plan, white and Negro students will not go to school together. Instead, Negro children will continue to attend all Negro schools. The very evil that Brown was aimed at will not be cured, but will be perpetuated. Justice Marshall, in his dissenting opinion, predicted that. He said that the public may think that they have accomplished something great here, but he said they will come to regret dividing the area up into two communities, black and white. After 20 years of small, often difficult steps toward that great end, the court today takes a giant step backwards.

Therefore, I file a descending opinion joined by Judges Douglas, Brennan, and White. I mean, at this point, the country was trending towards just an anti-busing. Right. You know, and so it would have gone against sort of mass public opinion. Right. And actually, yes. And it was a whole backlash against the civil rights movement in general. Because I'll give you one other thing. In 1972, we have the presidential primaries, right? Who won the Democratic primary in Michigan that year?

George Wallace. Segregationist governor. Segregationist governor. Won the Democratic primary. What happened to Verda Bradley and her son Ronald? She really didn't have any regrets in participating in the case, but she was concerned because she said Ronald never really recovered from the publicity and from the backlash. She said he had dropped out of school in the 10th grade. And in 2004, he was unemployed. And I don't

know anything more from that. I wonder, you know, I've seen studies looking at, you know, the segregation of schools today, the numbers. and some studies suggest that they're even higher than they were in the 1970s. And I wonder what is the relevance of this case today? What did this do in terms of shaping the conversation from that point on? And how do we see it in our lives to this day? Well, I mean, I think what we have to remember is that the Milliken case really pretty much ended any meaningful efforts at desegregating schools and metropolitan areas in the non-southern parts of the country. But what you had in Detroit was a pattern that wasn't unusual, right, where you had central cities that were composed of people of color and large part African-Americans in those central cities then surrounded by mostly white suburbs. And the Supreme Court basically closed off a remedy, try to deal with segregation. And so the problem continues that there's got to be some ways that we could rethink how states, you know, draw their district lines and how they create their schools and maintain their schools in ways that could overcome some of this segregation. But I just don't think there's a will to do that. I think if people were really interested, they could find a way to do it. We were able to eliminate the mythology

that there's a difference between the North and the South in terms of race. It's a phenomenon that is seamless. That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abden-Fattah. I'm Ramteen Adablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me.

And Jamie York. Jordana Hochman. Lawrence Wu. Blaine Kaplan-Levinson. Grace Meising-Somber. Nigery Eaton. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Julia Chance. And a special thank you to Anya Grunman.

Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric. If you like something you heard or you have an idea for an episode, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org or hit us up on Twitter at ThruLineNPR. Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Thanks for listening. This message comes from NPR sponsor Grammarly. What if everyone at work were an expert communicator? Inbox numbers would drop, customer satisfaction scores would rise, and everyone would be more productive. That's what happens when you give Grammarly to your entire team. Grammarly is a secure AI writing partner that understands your business and can transform it through better communication. Join 70,000 teams who trust Grammarly with their words and their data. Learn more at Grammarly.com. Grammarly. Easier said, done.