The following is an excerpt from the book, "THE CONTAINMENT: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North," by Michelle Adams. It's published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025.
The author is a Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan.
The book tells the story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools—and what happened when it collided with Nixon appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution.
Chapter 1
CLASH IN MIDTOWN
By Michelle Adams
On Tuesday morning, June 13, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson and Thurgood Marshall strolled to a podium in the Rose Garden. Marshall stood slightly behind Johnson, with his right hand in his pocket as Johnson spoke deliberately into twin microphones under a blistering sun. As the press corps looked on, Johnson announced that he wanted Marshall to serve as an associate justice on the Supreme Court, and he asked the Senate to confirm his
nomination.

president not so subtly reminded the nation about the importance of Brown v. Board of Education and Marshall’s role in the case: “He has already earned his place in history.”
Now it was time to take the next step. Two months later, Marshall was confirmed by the Senate in a 69–11 vote and would take his seat as the ninety-sixth justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
On the very same day that Johnson announced his historic court pick, Reverend Albert Cleage Jr. entered the School Center Building at the corner of Woodward and Putnam Avenues in Midtown Detroit.
Passing through the art deco building’s two-story-tall, intricately carved archway, Cleage was headed to speak at a Detroit Board of Education meeting. Wayne State University, Cleage’s alma mater, was steps away. So, too, was one of famed architect Cass Gilbert’s masterpieces, the main branch of the Detroit Public Library.3 (Gilbert also designed the U. S. Supreme Court building.) And just across Woodward at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Diego Rivera’s four thousand-thirty-square-foot mural, Detroit Industry, celebrated the struggle and dignity of the workingman.
Cleage had come to the School Center to do battle—not for integration but for black schools. In his hands was a report prepared by his group, the Inner City Parents Council, detailing the vast disparities between black and white students’ achievement levels and dropout rates. In many respects, the report was unremarkable.
Black Detroiters had long protested both overt and covert race discrimination in the city’s public schools. Anyone remotely familiar with Detroit’s schools already knew that black and white students weren’t getting an equal education. That the Detroit Board of Education was failing to educate black children was a fairly anodyne observation. Where the report broke new ground was in its assessment of how and why that was the case. The central thesis of Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954, was that racially segregated schools harmed black children.
This was summed up in one of the decision’s most famous passages: “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”
According to Brown, the racial separateness itself created harm, the “feeling of inferiority.”
The report took a different view. It asserted that Detroit’s “failure to educate inner city children stems from the schools’ deliberate and system- atic destruction of the Afro-American child’s self-image and racial pride.”
From this perspective, the fact that Detroit’s schools were largely racially segregated wasn’t the problem that needed to be solved. Racial separate- ness wasn’t the source of the harm.
White control of black schools was. The presence of even the most talented and committed white teachers and principals, “white power symbols,” signaled to black students that they were intellectually inferior and powerless to control their circumstances. This negative messaging sapped black students of the will to learn and set them up to fail. White administrators and racially biased textbooks, the report charged, robbed black children of “any motivation to learn and to develop because he sees nothing around him to make learning and self development . . . an avenue of escape from the conditions in which he lives or an instrument by which he can change these conditions.”
The Inner City Parents Council believed that black schools were an essential bulwark against the effects of white supremacy, which permeated almost every element of black life in the city of Detroit: “They do not own the stores where they buy. They do not control the banks which cash their checks. They do not own the apartment houses in which they live. They do not control the political structure which dominates their communities,” the report asserted. Only black-controlled schools could counteract the “influences of a white community which constantly threaten to engulf and destroy him.”

Author Michelle Adams
Dr. Remus Robinson, the first black member of the Detroit Board of Education, wasn’t in the mood. A staunch integrationist, he had frequently been the subject of Cleage’s criticisms; back in 1962, Cleage had published an article asserting that “Dr. Robinson does not represent the Negro community which elected him to office.”
Robinson, for his part, thought Cleage’s ideas skirted dangerously close to racism. Now he accused Cleage—who demanded all-black schools and rejected integration at the meeting—of adopting “the kind of thinking that has been at the root of the problems you have defined.”
“I reject the implied suggestion that the all-Negro schools of the South are superior to Detroit schools,” Robinson declared.
Backing Robinson up was Abraham Zwerdling, a noted white labor lawyer and lifetime member of the NAACP who was next in line to be board president. He pounded on the table, ordering Cleage to be quiet.
But Cleagenjust got louder. “I’m talking!” he shouted. “This is a big liberal here, but he doesn’t want to listen to a black man.”
Cleage certainly hadn’t changed Zwerdling’s mind. The board “would not turn its back” on the goal of integration, he proclaimed.
This, then, was the central question over which they clashed: Who would control the city’s schools? The black community or white administrators? To Cleage, this critical question of control trumped any imperative to in- tegrate the schools.
The day after the meeting, the Detroit Free Press ran an article about the gathering, “Outbursts Mar School Meeting,” calling it “unusual” and “emotional.”
The “table-pounding shouting match” between Cleage and Zwerdling made the meeting newsworthy. But it was notable for another reason: the meeting provided an almost perfect distillation of two iconic, rival philosophies of social change, each intended to improve black students’ education.
The Inner City Parents Council’s report and Cleage’s testimony at the meeting reflected the first of these, which had taken certain segments of the black community by storm: black nationalism.
Cleage shared a deep ideological kinship with Malcolm X, the most important black nationalist of the twentieth century. The two men were well acquainted, having spoken on numerous occasions.
Back in 1963, Malcolm X delivered his famous “Message to the Grass Roots” at the King Solomon Baptist Church in northwest Detroit. (Cleage was in attendance.) Elec- trifying the boisterous crowd, Malcolm exhorted blacks to “close ranks” to defeat their common white enemy. “Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms—as Reverend Cleage was pointing out beautifully—singing ‘We Shall Overcome,’” Malcolm exclaimed. “You don’t do
that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing, you’re too busy swinging.”22 Cleage praised the speech unequivocally. “I can think of no basic matter upon which we disagreed,” he later stated.
Just a few months before the June 1967 board of education meeting, Cleage gave a speech praising the late civil rights leader. One of Malcolm’s central teachings, the reverend said, was that integration was both “impossible and undesirable.”24 From this perspective, school desegregation—which Brown v. Board of Education and several follow-on cases required (at least in the South)—was unnecessary. Malcolm’s view, which Cleage endorsed, was that “we are going to control our own communities. We are going to stop worrying about being separate.”
This was a new front in the debate over the question of school integration: a strike on the principles laid out in Brown, but one that came from black nationalists rather than white segregationists.
The Inner City Parents Council wasn’t the only organization that made a proposal for improving public education to the Detroit Board of Education on that mid-June afternoon. The Detroit Urban League (DUL) made the other. The DUL was formed in 1916 to assist Detroit’s black community, particularly blacks migrating from the South.
The DUL was a traditional civil rights organization that, in words of noted University of Michigan historian Sidney Fine, “pressed the city government to deal with such matters as housing, employment, and police-community rela- tions even though it did not take to the streets.”
The DUL (along with the NAACP) represented the other iconic philosophy intended to advance black educational opportunity: racial integration.
Where Cleage and the Inner City Parents Council expressly rejected integration as a means to improve black students’ education, the DUL embraced it. Brown v. Board of Education was its touchstone. Given that, the fact that the DUL empha- sized its commitment to “quality integrated education” at the meeting was no surprise.
The group made several proposals to the board of which two stood out: establishing “magnet” schools with unique, high-quality programs attractive to students throughout the city, and developing an “educational park” that would—much like a university—educate thousands of students simultaneously at one multiple-acre site.
But what did magnet schools and education parks have to do with “quality integrated educa- tion”? The short answer was everything because Detroit was highly residentially segregated.
And so behind the “table-pounding shouting match” were two rival philosophies about how best to achieve racial justice: racial integration and black nationalism. The two philosophies yielded two different sets of proposals aimed at enhancing black students’ educational opportunities. These two iconic philosophies had been extensively debated on the national stage by civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Bayard Rustin, and Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture). Now they would frame the local debate about the direction of Detroit’s public schools.
The book can be purchased by clicking here.
The author Michelle Adams will discuss the book at the Detroit Historical Society on Sunday, Feb. 2 at 2-4 p.m. at 5401 Woodward in Detroit. To register click here.