Milliken v. Bradley (1974)
Unlike Brown v. Board of Education and Keyes
- Southern cases of de juro segregation (legal under state law) - Milliken was a
case of de facto segregation as a result of the dividing lines between the
school districts of Michigan. It was a fact that the urban area of Detroit was
populated predominately by black citizens, while the suburbs were predominately
white. Thus the schools were hardly integrated. Ronald Bradley, an
African-American student in Detroit’s inner city, filed a lawsuit with the aid
of the NAACP, claiming that the lines had been drawn purposely to segregate the
white and black schoolchildren. A federal court agreed with Bradley, finding
numerous examples of deliberate segregation by the Detroit school board. The
board was ordered to create a desegregation plan that would incorporate students
from eighty-five suburban districts as well as the city. This plan would call
for busing for students from the city to the suburbs, and vice versa. The
federal court of appeals felt that “not to affirm [federal district court judge]
Roth’s plan would ‘nullify’ Brown and turn the education clock back to the
‘separate-but-equal’ doctrine of Plessy.”1
Marshall knew the proposal of inter-district busing would
seem revolutionary to President Nixon and to many Americans, but he strove to
convince his fellow justices that the case was an important step in the process
of completely desegregating public schools. The Supreme Court
struck down the lower court’s determination, claiming that the court could not
impose a remedy for de facto segregation for one school district. This was the
first case since Brown in which a school desegregation plan was negated by the
Supreme Court.
The judges were split 5 - 4 on this decision. Marshall was
one of the dissenters, and he addressed the nation, “Desegregation is not and
was never expected to be an easy task. … In the short run, it may seem to be the
easier course to allow our great metropolitan cities to be divided up each into
two cities - one white, the other black - but it is a course, I predict, our
people will ultimately regret.”2
1 A Defiant Life (p234)
2 Dream Makers, Dream Breakers (p374)