Author Event | Michelle Adams: The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

When

Thursday January 16, 2025: 6:30pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Description

Join professor Michelle Adams for a discussion of her new book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. She will be joined in conversation by James Tobin.

About The Containment: 

In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why? 

In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools―and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight―and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate―and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today. 

Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on race discrimination, school desegregation, affirmative action, and housing law. Adams is the winner of the 2024 L. Hart Wright Teaching Award. She has published in The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and other scholarly journals. Her work also has appeared in the popular media, including a piece in The New Yorker commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. In addition, she has appeared as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court.

James Tobin is a professor of journalism at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Educated at the University of Michigan, where he earned bachelor's and doctoral degrees in history, he spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter and freelance writer. His books include Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II (Free Press, 1997), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography; To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight (Free Press, 2003), which won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award; and The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency (Simon & Schuster, 2013). In the classroom he specializes in narrative nonfiction, both historical and contemporary.

This event is in partnership with Literati Bookstore and includes a signing with books for sale.