DETROIT – You might call it the civil rights case that never ended. Half a century ago, black parents in Detroit were convinced that the city’s schools were effectively segregated and their children were being sent to clearly inferior schools.
The NAACP then sued the state in August, 1970 charging that this was due to decades of now illegal racially discriminatory policies and sued, demanding the courts provide relief.
What happened then made social, political and legal history. “Bradley v. Milliken was the first case dealing with deliberately segregated public schools in the United States,” said retired U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn, the man who finally closed down the case in 1989, almost two decades after it was first filed.
The first school desegregation case, that is, since Brown v.Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case in which a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court had held that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. That was clear, but when the court handed down its decision, they said schools would have to desegregate with “all deliberate speed.” There was deliberation, but little speed.
Frustrated, Detroit parents demanded action. The case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Stephen Roth, who found in 1971 that the Detroit schools were indeed deliberately segregated.
Most expected he would order a plan to decentralize and integrate the city schools, but Judge Roth went beyond that. In a stunning ruling in June, 1972, he ruled that any plan to eliminate segregation in Detroit schools alone would be inadequate, and that a desegregation plan would have to involve most of the suburbs.
In other words, that meant cross-district busing of black students to white suburbs, and white students from 53 suburbs to schools in Detroit. This caused widespread and bitter opposition, even panic, among suburban parents.
Ku Klux Klan members already had blown up school buses in nearby Pontiac, after a plan to bus white pupils to schools in black areas was announced. Those opposing busing appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, but they twice upheld the court.
There were huge public protests. Busing became a major political issue in 1972, and probably caused Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley to lose a race for the U.S. Senate.
Finally, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on July 25, 1974, ruled 5-4 that the courts could not order cross-district busing unless it could be shown that the suburban school districts had also engaged in a policy of segregation. That couldn’t be done because few blacks then had attempted to move there.
Bradley v Milliken is now well-known as the case that ended cross-district busing nationwide. But it didn’t end the case in Detroit. The high court said that Detroit still had to come up with a desegregation plan, but one that involved only Detroit.
Stephen Roth, the judge who had ordered cross-district busing, never knew that he had been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. He died of a heart attack just before their verdict.
The case was assigned to another federal judge, Robert DeMascio, who not only ordered a busing plan, but mandated a number of educational and managerial improvements, set up a monitoring commission to enforce them, and ordered the state to pay half the costs of his educational programs.
The state and the school board eventually went back to the U.S. Supreme Court — which unanimously supported the judge.
From there, however, the case took many twists and turns. Judge DeMascio eventually recused himself, and a three-judge panel presided over the case, which soon moved from being integration-focused to a series of squabbles over educational improvements.
In 1985, Judge Cohn took over sole responsibility for what started as a school desegregation case. Within a few years, he realized it was time to end the case. The court, he felt, had been put in the position of making decisions about things like curriculum and a student code of conduct that were best handled by a board of education. As for segregation — that had become a moot point.
The Detroit Public Schools had “achieved ‘unitary status’ as that term is commonly used in school desegregation cases,” the judge wrote when ending the case in 1989. Translation: Nearly all the students were black by then. But he added:
“None of those is to say the Detroit system is problem free. Indeed, it is not,” he wrote, adding that there were “massive deficiencies which the Detroit Board must deal with in the future.”
They were, as he feared never dealt with. Detroit’s schools got worse and worse. White flight was followed by middle-class black flight; enrollment fell from 182,000 in 1990 to fewer than 48,000 in 2015. The schools careened in and out of bankruptcy and bouts of emergency management by the state
“They were allowed to atrophy. My fears were realized,” Judge Cohn, now retired, said in a recent interview.
“And the repercussions haven’t really ended,” he said, adding that he sees a recent case as a direct descendant of Bradley vMilliken. Five years ago, seven students filed a new lawsuit claiming there was a constitutional right to literacy, and the Detroit schools were so bad they had never learned how to read.
A federal judge ruled against them. But a three-judge panel from the Sixth Circuit Court of appeals reversed that, ruling that there was a fundamental right to literacy implicit in the U.S. Constitution.
However, at that point the state settled the case, paying each student roughly $40,000 and the district $2.7 million.
But both sides fully expect more such suits.
There are some hopeful signs now, including a dynamic new Detroit school superintendent, Nikolai Vitti, but few who have choices put their kids in the Detroit public schools today.
What might have happened if the Supreme Court had ruled cross-district busing legal? Judge Cohn doesn’t think much would have changed. Detroit and its housing stock was aging, and “simply became a less attractive place to live.”
But the truth is that we’ll never know.
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