As I reflected on Justice Scalia’s comments in Parents Involved, I thought of an earlier school segregation case from 1974 called Milliken v. Bradley. It arose in my hometown of Detroit. Every year, I’d teach the case in my constitutional law class and attempt to explain why it was so incredibly important. And every year I failed. I’d explain that the Detroit branch of the NAACP brought a lawsuit against state and local school officials alleging that—as a result of official government policy—students in the Detroit public schools were segregated on the basis of race.
The case was a triumph for the NAACP; it proved that Detroit’s schools were unconstitutionally segregated. It won its case against the state and local government. Because of Brown, the victory meant that black students in Detroit were entitled to attend integrated schools. But there was a big problem: there weren’t enough white students in Detroit to have meaningful integration, and a Detroit-only integration plan would further incentivize whites to leave the city. Recognizing these difficulties, the trial judge in the case ordered that students in nearby suburban—and largely white—school districts be included in a sweeping plan to integrate Detroit’s schools. The trial judge believed that what came to be called a “metropolitan remedy” was both appropriate and required. In this, Brown was his guiding light.
I had special feelings for Detroit, but in many ways the city wasn’t unique. The racial composition of the Detroit metropolitan area was distressingly familiar. There was even a name for the phenomenon: “chocolate city, vanilla suburbs.” The term was popularized by “Chocolate City,” a 1975 hit song by the legendary funk band Parliament. The song celebrated the shifting demographics of the nation’s capital—“God bless [Washington, D.C.] and its vanilla suburbs”—and “name-checked” several other majority black cities. And, just as the urban-suburban racial divide that characterized the Detroit metropolitan area was prototypical, its causes were equally ubiquitous: racially restrictive covenants, redlining, racial steering, blockbusting, mortgage lending discrimination, racially segregated public housing, urban renewal, exclusionary zoning, white violence. For these reasons, it was hard to overstate the importance of the trial judge’s ruling. If metropolitan “cross-district” desegregation could be ordered in Detroit, it conceivably could be ordered anywhere.
But when the Milliken case reached the Supreme Court, the judge’s plan was overturned. In a 5–4 decision, the justices ruled that the trial judge had gone too far and that suburban school districts that had not formally engaged in racial discrimination could not be included in a larger integration plan. Because of Brown, students had a right not to be confined to racially segregated schools. Due to Milliken, however, for most black students in the North, the rights protected under Brown were meaningless. Brown had been violated. Black schoolchildren had won the case. But it didn’t matter. What mattered more were the interests of the suburban school districts, and they wanted nothing to do with integrating Detroit’s schools.