Milliken v. Bradley

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Milliken v. Bradley
Seal of the United States Supreme Court.svg
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 27, 1974
Decided July 25, 1974
Full case name Milliken, Governor of Michigan, et al. v. Bradley, et al.
Citations418 U.S. 717 ( more )
94 S. Ct. 3112; 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069; 1974 U.S. LEXIS 94
Case history
PriorBradley v. Milliken, 433 F.2d 897 (6th Cir. 1970); 438 F.2d 945 (6th Cir. 1971); 338 F. Supp. 582 (E.D. Mich. 1971); 345 F. Supp. 914 (E.D. Mich. 1972); affirmed, 484 F.2d 215 (6th Cir. 1973); cert. granted, 414 U.S. 1038(1973).
SubsequentOn remand, Bradley v. Milliken, 402 F. Supp. 1096 (E.D. Mich. 1975); affirmed and remanded, 540 F.2d 229 (6th Cir. 1976); cert. granted, 429 U.S. 958(1976); affirmed, 433 U.S. 267 (1977).
Holding
The Court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Court membership
Chief Justice
Warren E. Burger
Associate Justices
William O. Douglas  · William J. Brennan Jr.
Potter Stewart  · Byron White
Thurgood Marshall  · Harry Blackmun
Lewis F. Powell Jr.  · William Rehnquist
Case opinions
MajorityBurger, joined by Stewart, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist
ConcurrenceStewart
DissentDouglas
DissentWhite, joined by Douglas, Brennan, Marshall
DissentMarshall, joined by Douglas, Brennan, White
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. [1] It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United States following the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. [2]

Contents

The ruling clarified the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, confirming that segregation was allowed if it was not considered an explicit policy of each school district. In particular, the Court held that the school systems were not responsible for desegregation across district lines unless it could be shown that they had each deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation. It was the first Supreme Court decision to hold that a lower court's desegregation order was broader than needed to remedy the constitutional violation. [3] : 101 

School segregation in Detroit

Brown v. Board of Education was a landmark desegregation ruling, but difficult to implement, and only addressed the legal segregation that was common in the South. Some post-Brown desegreation decisions continued the process of integrating public facilities like city parks, recreation areas, and public beaches. [4] Post-Brown education cases decided by the Supreme Court between 1968 and 1973 placed an affirmative duty on school boards to integrate. [5]

Desegregation busing was upheld by the Supreme Court in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg (1971), but the policy was controversial. [6] During the Great Migration, Detroit gained a large black population, but blacks were excluded from white neighborhoods, and experienced various forms of racist and discriminatory harassment. The impact of Detroit's racial history, including restrictive covenants, mob violence, and race riots, and the deterioration of the city's public schools in the 1970s has been extensively researched. [7] Many factors contributed to school segregation in US cities, including white flight to suburbs, and discriminatory practices known as redlining that kept suburban home ownership out of reach for black families. [8] [9] Swann did not directly address housing discrimination and other practices that contributed to these demographic changes. [10]

Some of the discriminatory policies in Detroit ended as public awareness increased and became more sensitive to the national civil rights movement, which began after World War II, and as black voting power in city precincts increased. The changes allowed Black people to move into additional neighborhoods in the City, but some neighborhoods resisted and for the most part little or no change of segregative practices occurred in the suburbs. The residential patterns in metropolitan Detroit at the time Milliken v. Bradley was decided all but guaranteed that most city schools would be "racially identifiable". [4] [11]

Procedural history

On August 18, 1970, the NAACP filed suit against Michigan state officials, including Governor William Milliken. The original trial began on April 6, 1971, and lasted for 41 days. The NAACP argued that although schools were not officially segregated (white only), the city of Detroit and the State as represented by its surrounding counties had enacted policies to increase racial segregation in schools. The NAACP also suggested a direct relationship between unfair housing practices (such as redlining) and educational segregation. [12] District Judge Stephen J. Roth initially denied the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction.

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the "implementation of the April 7 plan was [unconstitutionally] thwarted by State action in the form of the Act of the Legislature of Michigan" and remanded the case for an expedited trial on the merits. [13]

On remand to the District Court, Judge Roth held the State of Michigan and the school districts accountable for the segregation, [14] and ordered the implementation of a desegregation plan. [15]

The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed some of the decision, [16] specifically the official segregation that had been practiced by the City's school district, but withheld judgment on the relationship of housing segregation with education. The Court specified that it was the state's responsibility to integrate across the segregated metropolitan area. [4]

The accused officials appealed to the Supreme Court, which took up the case on February 27, 1974 to decide whether federal courts could remedy constitutional violations within the city of Detroit by busing students to schools in the suburbs. [12] [17]

Supreme Court

Decision

The Supreme Court overturned the lower courts in a 5-to-4 decision, holding that desegregation orders were limited to the school district that had caused the segregation. After this decision, a multidistrict desegregation order was valid only if lower courts found that the suburban school districts had contributed to the segregation, or the redistricting was intentionally racist. [18]

The plaintiffs argued that desegregation could not be achieved without the common desegregation order. However, the Sixth Circuit found that the constitutional violation, the disparate treatment of students on the basis of race, had occurred within the Detroit school district, and limited the "scope of the remedy" accordingly. [19] [17]

The court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education. The Court noted that desegregation, "in the sense of dismantling a dual school system," did not require "any particular racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'" [20] [3] : 82 

The Court also emphasized the importance of local control over the operation of schools.

Concurrence

Justice Potter Stewart wrote that federal courts could only remedy segregation when there was evidence that state power was a contributing factor, however assertions of segregation in fact caused by white flight, economic disadvantage and other demographic factors. [18]

Dissents

Justice Thurgood Marshall's dissenting opinion stated that:

School district lines, however innocently drawn, will surely be perceived as fences to separate the races when, under a Detroit-only decree, white parents withdraw their children from the Detroit city schools and move to the suburbs in order to continue them in all-white schools. [21]

Justice William O. Douglas's dissenting opinion stated that:

Today's decision ... means that there is no violation of the Equal Protection Clause though the schools are segregated by race and though the black schools are not only "separate" but "inferior."... Michigan by one device or another has over the years created black school districts and white school districts, the task of equity is to provide a unitary system for the affected area where, as here, the State washes its hands of its own creations. [22]

Impact of the case

The Supreme Court's decision required the City of Detroit's school district to redistribute the relatively small number of white students more widely across the district. According to Wayne State professor John Mogk, the decision also enabled the white flight that re-entrenched the city's segregation. [12] The Detroit Public Schools became even more disproportionately black over the next two decades (with 90% black students in 1987). [4] Detroit remains one of the most segregated cities in the US. [7]

This result reaffirmed the national pattern of city schools attended mostly by Black people, with surrounding suburban schools mostly attended by Whites. [4] [23]

Post-Milliken claims for interdistrict relief attempted to show that redistricting unconstitutionally excluded black majority school districts. The Supreme Court refused to review one such desegregation plan in Delaware, and vacated a Seventh Circuit decision holding that public housing policies contributed to interdistrict segregation. [18] Two years after Milliken the Supreme Court reaffirmed the limited scope of school desegregation orders in Pasadena Board of Education v. Spangler , and further limited city-wide busing in Dayton Board of Education v. Brinkman . [24]

See also

References

  1. ↑ Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). PD-icon.svg This article incorporates public domain material from this U.S government document.
  2. ↑ Brown v. Board of Education , 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
  3. 1 2 Levin, Betsy; Moise, Philip (1975). "School Desegregation Litigation in the Seventies and the Use of Social Science Evidence: An Annotated Guide". Law and Contemporary Problems. 39 (1): 50–133.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 Robert A. Sedler, The Profound Impact of Milliken v. Bradley , 33 Wayne L. Rev. 1693(1987).
  5. ↑ Race and Racism in the United States: An Encyclopedia of the American Mosaic. Vol. 1–4. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood. 2014.
  6. ↑ Winerip, Michael (September 9, 2013). ""Desegregation and the Public Schools"". The New York Times.
  7. 1 2 Khalifa, M.; Douglas, T.-R. M. O.; Chambers, T. V. (2016). "White Gazes of Black Detroit: Milliken v. Bradley I, Postcolonial Theory, and Persistent Inequalities". Teachers College Record. 118 (3): 1–34.
  8. ↑ Reynolds Farley; Sheldon Danziger; Harry J. Holzer (2002). "The Evolution of Racial Segregation". Detroit divided . New York: Russell Sage Foundation. ISBN   9780871542816.
  9. ↑ William L. Taylor, Desegregating Urban School Systems After Milliken v. Bradley, 21 Wayne L. Rev. 751(1975).
  10. ↑ Vavrus, Michael J. (2015). Diversity and Education: A Critical Multicultural Approach. New York: Teachers College Press. p. 59.
  11. ↑ Milliken v. Bradley 418 US at 739.
  12. 1 2 3 Samantha Meinke, Milliken v. Bradley: The Northern Battle for Desegregation , 90 Mich. Bar J. 20(Sept. 2011).
  13. ↑ Bradley v. Milliken, 433F.2d897 ( 6th Cir. 1970).
  14. ↑ Bradley v. Milliken, 338F. Supp.582 ( E.D. Mich. 1971).
  15. ↑ Bradley v. Milliken, 345F. Supp.914 (E.D. Mich.1972).
  16. ↑ Bradley v. Milliken, 484F.2d215 (6th Cir.1973).
  17. 1 2 James, David R. (December 1989). "City Limits on Racial Equality: The Effects of City-Suburb Boundaries on Public-School Desegregation, 1968-1976". American Sociological Review. 54 (6): 963–985. doi:10.2307/2095718. JSTOR   2095718.
  18. 1 2 3 Taylor, William L. (1978). "The Supreme Court and Recent School Desegregation Cases: The Role of Social Science in a Period of Judicial Retrenchment". Law and Contemporary Problems. 42 (4): 48–51.
  19. ↑ Milliken v. Bradley, 418 US at 744.
  20. ↑ Milliken v. Bradley, 418 US at 745
  21. ↑ Milliken, 418 U.S. at 804–05 (Marshall, J., dissenting).
  22. ↑ Milliken, 418 U.S. at 761–62 (Douglas, J., dissenting).
  23. ↑ Nadworthy, Elissa; Turner, Cory (July 25, 2019). "This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines A Tool For Segregation". NPR.
  24. ↑ Wilkinson, J. Harvie (1979). From Brown to Bakke: The Supreme Court and School Integration: 1945-1978. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 246.

Further reading

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