The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North

Join Southfield Library and IRP Detroit as we welcome author Michelle Adams with her new book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North.

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.

Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures-including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country’s promise.

Books will be available for purchase and signing. Light refreshments courtesy of IRP Detroit.