The Metropolitan Revolution by Jon C. Teaford

Author:Jon C. Teaford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/United States/20th Century
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4.6 Antibusing demonstrators in Michigan, early 1970s. (Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

The suburban school districts appealed to the United States Supreme Court, where attorneys for the NAACP defended Roth’s ruling. Speaking of the central city and suburbs, the NAACP general counsel argued: “They are bound together by economic interests, recreation interests, social concerns and interests, governmental interests of various sorts, and a transportation network.”89 In other words, socially, economically, and culturally the metropolitan area was a single entity. Consequently, busing advocates believed that all its subdivisions should share in the legal remedy proposed to achieve equal educational opportunity.

In 1974, in Milliken v. Bradley, the Supreme Court disagreed, overruling Roth’s draconian scheme by a 5 to 4 vote. Speaking for the five-person majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger contended: “No single tradition in public education is more deeply rooted than local control over the operation of schools.” Deferring to this tradition, the Court was not willing to uphold Roth’s inter district scheme for racial mixing. Burger held that “without an inter district violation …, there is no constitutional wrong calling for an inter district remedy.”90 According to the majority, there was no evidence that the suburban districts had taken any unconstitutional actions to promote racial segregation in the Detroit schools, so Roth could not require them to be part of the remedy for correcting such segregation within the city of Detroit. The lower courts could order busing between black and white neighborhoods within the city of Detroit, but the suburbs could not be forced to be involved. Detroit’s segregation problem was legally none of the suburbs’ business. They were separate entities; they were not part of the central city’s racial problems and thus need not be part of the mandated solution. Burger in effect excused white suburbanites from the hated remedy of busing. Central cities across the nation remained subject to busing orders, but for the most part busing between cities and suburbs was not necessary.

In this decision, the Supreme Court added the Constitution’s imprimatur to the destruction of the single-focus, interconnected metropolis. Contrary to the argument of the NAACP counsel, the Detroit metropolitan area was not a single entity bound together socially, its peripheral parts legally responsible for its core. Instead, it was a disparate mass of population in which the outer, predominantly white parts had no responsibility for the predominantly black core. The tradition of local control had trumped the notion of metropolitan interdependence. The periphery could abandon the center and pursue its independent course. In the 1978 Times poll, New York suburbanites had not felt part of a single metropolitan area, and neither had they believed that what went on in the central city affected them. Milliken v. Bradley was the constitutional equivalent of these findings. What happened in bankrupt New York City or poor, black Detroit need not concern people living, working, and shopping in separate communities twenty-five or thirty miles from decaying central-city downtowns.

The Supreme Court confirmed the suspicions of working-class whites stranded in the central city of Boston.

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