On Jan. 13, the Brooklyn Public Library’s Center for Brooklyn History (BPL-CBH) hosted an in-person and virtual conversation with Michelle Adams, who discussed her debut book “The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North” (MacMillan, 2025).
Aaron Robertson, author of “The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America” (MacMillan, 2024), moderated the event.
An excerpt of the book description on MacMillan’s website states: “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.”
Adams was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and she is the Henry M. Butzel professor of law at the University of Michigan. She is also the former co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
She started the conversation by sharing what led her to write the book, reflecting on her experience as a young Black child attending school there in 1967. She said that although she did not understand why her parents made confident choices for her for a long time, she did not understand until she started Robertson’s book.
She shared how her parents chose to send her to a private school in Bloomfield Hills as a child, many miles away from where she grew up. Although she was taken seriously there as a young person, she realized not many other kids like her were attending that school at the time.
However, she realized it was the opposite when she went home daily.
“I wondered why, and I wanted to understand that. I started asking many questions, and I think this book is a culmination of trying to answer the questions I started asking as I was a young person: Why does Detroit look the way it looks? Why am I going to a school that’s so far away from my house? Why are the sports teams that we play all predominantly white?” She wanted to know more and said it is a process she has gone through throughout her life, culminating in her thinking about writing this book.
In 1974, two decades after Brown v. Board of Education, another Supreme Court decision – Milliken v. Bradley – effectively halted school desegregation across the North, shattering 20 years of progress towards equal education. The lawsuit, filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) against Michigan Governor Milliken, challenged racial segregation in Detroit public schools, which were over 70% Black at the time.
Adams then shared the story of June Shagalov, whom she met in her 90s and who passed away just a few years ago.
“She’s been called the Johnny Appleseed organizing in the North. She was someone who went coast to coast and was organizing Black communities, helping them try to figure out a way to desegregate the schools,” she stated.
Furthermore, she believes that it’s important to remember one of the book’s many untold stories, which involves how much activism was happening on the ground in the 1960s that was driven not by the higher-ups but by Black parents.
“So, the question is: Why are they so interested that they’re going to protest to get desegregation? Part of the story that I’m trying to tell in the book is that this is coming from quarters that we basically haven’t thought much about.”
Those who are interested can find all the details to purchase the book here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374250423/thecontainment/
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