The Detroit school busing case

the long version

Overview: In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, racial equality in American public education appeared to have a bright future. But for many that brightness dimmed considerably following the Supreme Court's decision in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which emerged from Detroit's efforts to use cross-district busing to desegregate its schools and was the first such case to originate outside the South. In its controversial 5-4 decision, the Supreme ruled that, since there was no evidence that the suburban school districts had deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation, the lower court's remedy of busing school children across municipal lines was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown--which the Court said could only address de jure, not de facto segregation. In this first book-length account of the case, Joyce Baugh provides a richly detailed account of how and why Milliken came about and analyzes its subsequent impact on both civil rights jurisprudence and public education in American cities.