by Michelle Adams
Farrar, Straus &  Giroux, New York: 2025

Reviewed by Michael King
July, 2025

So I am standing at a table of “new books” in the Barnes & Noble store on Fifth Avenue, NYC, looking at this big thick new book I have never heard of and asking myself, “Why am I about to buy another book about race relations in America?” I am all too aware that I have dozens of books on that subject waiting for me at home, unread. So why am I going to buy this one?

Well, I did buy it. And I am glad I did. Michelle Adams’ magnum opus is the definitive account of a neglected but critically important chapter in the history of our country’s struggle to come to terms with our long adherence to White Supremacy, and the various forms of white apartheid practiced by the dominant white majority throughout the United States to achieve and maintain that supremacy, not just in the “Jim Crow” states of the would-be Confederacy.

Desegregation of the country’s schools was central to the task of breaking from White Supremacy and ending American apartheid. Focusing on the archetypal case of Detroit and the all-white suburbs that surrounded it entering the 1960s, Adams chronicles how powerful forces and persons came together to resist the desegregation of Detroit’s schools, and ultimately successfully fought to preserve the ability of whites living in those suburbs to maintain their “whiteness,” most critically through maintaining the whiteness of their schools. This is the “containment” of the title, and the defeat of
desegregation in Detroit and the preservation of that containment fatally crippled the ability to desegregate schools, and the communities served by those schools, across the United States.

Adams demolishes the comfortable fictions that had justified to the American white legal and political establishments the fact of that containment. Detroit’s segregation was not a somehow-excusable “de facto” segregation that rested on the supposed private choices of the black denizens of Detroit Detroiters to remain within the confines of their city rather than move out to the burgeoning suburbs. Those suburbs were all-white because their white denizens residents wanted them that way, and were
prepared to use violence to keep things so.

Perhaps the most shocking revelation of Adams’ work is the extent of that white violence. I was drawn up short when I read that, on just one night in the Fall of October 1962 the homes of eight different black families trying to establish a life in those suburbs were vandalized (The Containment, page 158).

Ponder that for a moment. We know that violence against black families trying to move to the suburbs happened across the country, starting early in the 1950s and continuing well into the 1960s and even later. This awful behavior was recognized at least to the point that it gave us a famous play, and a movie adaptation of that play.

But the white media of that day never began to connect the dots and show us that what was actually happening was a raging epidemic of white violence, which actually must have numbered into the tens of thousands of attacks. And those attacks all too often moved beyond a white mob breaking windows, to the setting of homes ablaze and fusillades of gunfire.

This was nothing less than a white terror on a vast scale not seen since the KKK outrages of the 1870s, and it set the stage for the far more well-known black urban “riots” of the 1960s, including the Detroit “riot” of 1967. (I have only belatedly begun to appreciate why many blacks pointedly refer to those “riots” as uprisings; hence my placement of the more familiar, and pejorative, term “riots” in quotation marks.) The resulting white obliviousness to the extent of the violence of white communities against
black folks just trying to “move on up”their black counterparts helped to fuel the white condemnation of black “lawlessness,” which for all too many whites confirmed their deeply rooted prejudice against blacks. And that supposed “lawlessness” in turn hardened white determination to keep “those people” out of white neighborhoods, and white schools.

Adams is at her best in telling the story of the legal fight to desegregate Detroit schools. It is a story that includes how the plaintiffs proved to the full satisfaction of a white federal trial judge, who came to the case with little if any sympathy for their claims, that black Detroiters had indeed been the victims of systematic discrimination by state and local officials designed to keep them out of the white suburbs and confined to black-majority schools. Moreover, that judge ultimately realized that the only way to end that segregation was by a program of desegregation that must cross the school district lines behind which the whites of the suburbs were trying to hide.

The trial judge saw this. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed. But the Supreme Court of the United States reversed. It reversed because a president, who had staked his rise to the White House on pandering to white bigotry, appointed two justices who rejected the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted to deny to the white majority its evident desire to maintain a privileging American apartheid. And the votes of those two justices gave the forces of American apartheid, by a single vote, the victory they needed to preserve the “splendid isolation” of whites folks from folks persons of color, above all from the black descendants of those that whites folks used to hold in outright bondage. And this victory has set the stage for the ultimate backlash unfolding today, a backlash that aims to end the Second Reconstruction as decisively as white supremacists ended the first.

If things had happened otherwise, if the forces of desegregation had triumphed in Milliken v. Bradley, the NAACP was poised to follow up that victory with “copycat” cases across the country—cases they would have won going away because of the devastating one-two punch they could have deployed against systems of segregation factually indistinguishable from that proven to prevail in Detroit, and the power of what would have been the legal mandate of the Supreme Court to follow those facts and do to segregation everywhere what an alternate Court had affirmed must be done to it in Detroit and its suburbs. If that had happened, the ensuing social mixing of the races in schools across the country by the end of the 1970s would have fatally eroded the ability of whites to believe that they could maintain their privileged white enclaves. And closer to home, it is difficult to image that the City of Seattle would ever have faced the grim challenge it did in the 2000s of our history, of having to defend its voluntary program of school integration against a Supreme Court majority determined to turn the 14th Amendment’s mandate of equal protection inside out.

Sadly, the vote in Milliken went the way it did. For the next several decades, far too many whites were able to maintain their separation, and even worse to maintain their belief in their entitlement to that separation. And now, a political movement that draws on that still-deep reservoir of white entitlement is on the verge of plunging us all back into the dark tunnels of white supremacist tyranny.