The Detroit school busing case
Subtitle: Milliken v. Bradley and the controversy over desegregation
By: Joyce A. Baugh
Series: Landmark law cases & American society
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Lawrence
Language: eng
Number of pages: 234
ISBN-13: 9780700617661; 9780700617678
Description: Overview: In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, racial equality in American public education appeared to have a bright future. But for many that brightness dimmed considerably following the Supreme Court's decision in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), which emerged from Detroit's efforts to use cross-district busing to desegregate its schools and was the first such case to originate outside the South. In its controversial 5-4 decision, the Supreme ruled that, since there was no evidence that the suburban school districts had deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation, the lower court's remedy of busing school children across municipal lines was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown--which the Court said could only address de jure, not de facto segregation. In this first book-length account of the case, Joyce Baugh provides a richly detailed account of how and why Milliken came about and analyzes its subsequent impact on both civil rights jurisprudence and public education in American cities.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: From Plessy to Brown : the rise and demise of "separate but equal"; title: Metropolitan Detroit : from boomtown to ticking time bomb; title: Separate but unequal, northern style; title: Act 48 : decentralization trumps desegregation; title: Cross-district integration : remedying segregation or penalizing the suburbs?; title: Getting off the bus : Milliken in the Supreme Court; title: Milliken II and the retreat from school desegregation cases cited.