Milliken v. Bradley

Background

School desegregation has been the subject of judicial scrutiny for over a century. The challenge of maintaining a diverse student body within each school building is complicated by various legal, social, political, and [Page 549]educational contexts. In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), the Court revisited the previously held separate-but-equal doctrine, finding that the separation of children by race was a deliberate violation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While Brown abolished laws requiring or permitting segregated schools, it did not address de facto segregation until almost 20 years later in Key es v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colorado (1973). Moreover, school desegregation was not uniformly implemented following the decision. Attempts to implement the promises of Brown created controversy in educational circles.

In light of Brown, two decades of civil rights legislation and judicial opinions ensued in an attempt to desegregate schools. The expansion of desegregation rights ended with the Supreme Court's decision in Milliken I. In Milliken I, the school board in Detroit sought to remedy official acts of racial discrimination that were committed by both local officials and the state. The local board's violations included the improper use of attendance zones, racially based transportation of school children, and improper use of grade structures. Michigan, through various agencies, acted directly to maintain the pattern of segregation in the Detroit schools. As a means of remedy, the board in Detroit sought to integrate students in the largely minority city schools with those in the surrounding metropolitan suburban schools by utilizing an inter-district city-suburban desegregation remedy.

The Milliken I Ruling

In Milliken I, the first major defeat for proponents of desegregation, the Supreme Court ruled that surrounding suburban districts could not be ordered to help desegregate the city's schools unless plaintiffs could prove that the suburban systems were involved in illegally segregating city schools in the first place. The Court reasoned that it was improper to impose a multidistrict remedy for an individual board's de jure segregation in the absence of a finding that the other systems included in the interdistrict desegregation plan either failed to operate unitary school systems or committed acts that affected segregation within the other districts.

Reversing in favor of the suburban school systems in Milliken I, the Supreme Court determined that a federal trial court and the Sixth Circuit erred in upholding the desegregation plan insofar as there was no evidence that district boundary lines were established with the purpose of fostering racial segregation. The Court established that the plaintiffs failed to prove that the State of Michigan acted with a specific intent to segregate or that these actions caused the segregation before the judiciary could have applied interdistrict remedies such as busing. The Court added that it was troubled by the fact that the neighboring suburban school boards were not afforded any meaningful opportunities to be included in the plan to present evidence or to be heard on the suitability of the multidistrict remedy or on the constitutional violations that may have been imposed on them as a result of the plan. The Court concluded that because there was no interdistrict violation, there could be no inter-district remedy.

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