by Michelle Adams
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025
[Publication date: January 14, 2025]
"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground." ―Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review
The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs―and the defeat of desegregation in the North.
In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?
In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools―and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight―and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate―and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.
Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures―including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise.
REVIEWS:
"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground . . . In the [past] half-century . . . the Supreme Court . . . has made [diverse] public schools only harder to find. The Containment explains why." ―Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)
"Adams chronicles the case with a compelling blend of academic rigor, reportorial legwork and engaging prose . . . Instructive." ―Michael Bobelian, The Washington Post
"Adams provides a tour de force account of the epic struggle for racial justice in public schools that was derailed by a conservative Supreme Court." ―Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier
"Adams deftly illuminates the complex history and significance of the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley . . . [The Containment] is a riveting narrative that sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system in the 1960s and early 1970s, digging deep to tell the story about a creative, hard-fought attempt at metropolitan desegregation.” ―BookPage (starred review)
“Michelle Adams has written a truly beautiful, intimate, and powerful history of ordinary Detroiters’ determined fight to finally ensure equality of opportunity for Black children. As she makes painfully clear, the educational and residential segregation that came to devastate the country thereafter was not at all inevitable. It was an active choice and a legal betrayal on the part of too many Americans who were on the wrong side of history but whose short-sightedness might yet be undone.” ―Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the federal courts were committed to the pursuit of racial justice. In her mesmerizing new book, Michelle Adams re-creates the landmark case that shattered that commitment. The Containment is a history you have to read to understand the nation we’ve become.” ―Kevin Boyle, National Book Award–winning author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
"Michelle Adams has written the definitive history of Milliken v. Bradley, one of the most important Supreme Court cases of all time. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Containment fundamentally changes how we understand the history of civil rights. This page-turner illuminates how battles over school desegregation shaped cities and suburbs, and explains why issues like affirmative action remain political battlegrounds today." ―Matthew F. Delmont, Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth and author of Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
“How did the United States turn away from the promise of racial integration and quality education? Michelle Adams illuminates the schooling and housing practices in the North that separated whites and Blacks; the judge who tried remedial action; the politicians and justices who halted integration and spurred white flight from cities; and American law and ideals. With compelling narrative and powerful analysis, this important book offers vital instruction and searing reminders of what remains possible.” ―Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard Law School
"The lawless Milliken decision was a turning point in American history. It stopped rapid progress toward an integrated society and gave us the segregated, polarized nation we have today. Finally, here is a brilliant analysis of this monumental case, set in a richly compelling historical context, by a leading constitutional scholar." ―Myron Orfield, Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Minnesota Law School
“In this powerful and eloquent book, Michelle Adams reveals the history of how the Supreme Court undermined the promise of Brown v. Board of Education in a case from the author’s hometown: Detroit. Essential reading for all who care about equality in education.” ―Mary L. Dudziak, author of Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey
"Riveting . . . Adams’s meticulous recapping of the NAACP’s trial arguments serves as a disturbing window onto how Northern states created and maintained segregation . . . Rich in detail yet sprawling in scope, this shouldn’t be missed." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this comprehensive and well-documented history, legal scholar and Detroit native Adams brings the issues and people surrounding the case to life and explains its ongoing impact." ―Booklist
The epic story of Detroit's struggle to integrate schools in its suburbs―and the defeat of desegregation in the North.
In 1974, the Supreme Court issued a momentous decision: In the case of Milliken v. Bradley, the justices brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, and to the civil rights movement’s struggle for a truly equal education for all. How did this come about, and why?
In The Containment, the esteemed legal scholar Michelle Adams tells the epic story of the struggle to integrate Detroit schools―and what happened when it collided with Nixon-appointed justices committed to a judicial counterrevolution. Adams chronicles the devoted activists who tried to uplift Detroit's students amid the upheavals of riots, Black power, and white flight―and how their efforts led to federal judge Stephen Roth’s landmark order to achieve racial balance by tearing down the walls separating the city and its suburbs. The “metropolitan remedy” could have remade the landscape of racial justice. Instead, the Supreme Court ruled that the suburbs could not be a part of the effort to integrate―and thus upheld the inequalities that remain in place today.
Adams tells this story via compelling portraits of a city under stress and of key figures―including Detroit’s first Black mayor, Coleman Young, and Justices Marshall, Rehnquist, and Powell. The result is a legal and historical drama that exposes the roots of today’s backlash against affirmative action and other efforts to fulfill the country's promise.
REVIEWS:
"Splendid . . . Adams’s book explores class as well as race, with a richness and sophistication that recall J. Anthony Lukas’s 1985 masterpiece, Common Ground . . . In the [past] half-century . . . the Supreme Court . . . has made [diverse] public schools only harder to find. The Containment explains why." ―Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times Book Review (editors' choice)
"Adams chronicles the case with a compelling blend of academic rigor, reportorial legwork and engaging prose . . . Instructive." ―Michael Bobelian, The Washington Post
"Adams provides a tour de force account of the epic struggle for racial justice in public schools that was derailed by a conservative Supreme Court." ―Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier
"Adams deftly illuminates the complex history and significance of the 1974 Supreme Court case Milliken v. Bradley . . . [The Containment] is a riveting narrative that sweeps readers into the effort to challenge Detroit’s separate and unequal school system in the 1960s and early 1970s, digging deep to tell the story about a creative, hard-fought attempt at metropolitan desegregation.” ―BookPage (starred review)
“Michelle Adams has written a truly beautiful, intimate, and powerful history of ordinary Detroiters’ determined fight to finally ensure equality of opportunity for Black children. As she makes painfully clear, the educational and residential segregation that came to devastate the country thereafter was not at all inevitable. It was an active choice and a legal betrayal on the part of too many Americans who were on the wrong side of history but whose short-sightedness might yet be undone.” ―Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
“It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time when the federal courts were committed to the pursuit of racial justice. In her mesmerizing new book, Michelle Adams re-creates the landmark case that shattered that commitment. The Containment is a history you have to read to understand the nation we’ve become.” ―Kevin Boyle, National Book Award–winning author of Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age
"Michelle Adams has written the definitive history of Milliken v. Bradley, one of the most important Supreme Court cases of all time. Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Containment fundamentally changes how we understand the history of civil rights. This page-turner illuminates how battles over school desegregation shaped cities and suburbs, and explains why issues like affirmative action remain political battlegrounds today." ―Matthew F. Delmont, Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth and author of Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
“How did the United States turn away from the promise of racial integration and quality education? Michelle Adams illuminates the schooling and housing practices in the North that separated whites and Blacks; the judge who tried remedial action; the politicians and justices who halted integration and spurred white flight from cities; and American law and ideals. With compelling narrative and powerful analysis, this important book offers vital instruction and searing reminders of what remains possible.” ―Martha Minow, 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard Law School
"The lawless Milliken decision was a turning point in American history. It stopped rapid progress toward an integrated society and gave us the segregated, polarized nation we have today. Finally, here is a brilliant analysis of this monumental case, set in a richly compelling historical context, by a leading constitutional scholar." ―Myron Orfield, Earl R. Larson Professor of Civil Rights at the University of Minnesota Law School
“In this powerful and eloquent book, Michelle Adams reveals the history of how the Supreme Court undermined the promise of Brown v. Board of Education in a case from the author’s hometown: Detroit. Essential reading for all who care about equality in education.” ―Mary L. Dudziak, author of Exporting American Dreams: Thurgood Marshall’s African Journey
"Riveting . . . Adams’s meticulous recapping of the NAACP’s trial arguments serves as a disturbing window onto how Northern states created and maintained segregation . . . Rich in detail yet sprawling in scope, this shouldn’t be missed." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"In this comprehensive and well-documented history, legal scholar and Detroit native Adams brings the issues and people surrounding the case to life and explains its ongoing impact." ―Booklist
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michelle Adams is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. The former codirector of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration’s Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend: The Fight for America and the Showtime series Deadlocked: How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.
Plundered: How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America
by Bernadette Atuahene
Little, Brown and Company, 2025
[Publication date: January 28, 2025]
In the spirit of Evicted, a property law scholar uses the stories of two grandfathers—one white, one Black—who arrived in Detroit at the turn of the twentieth century to reveal how racist policies weaken Black families, widen the racial wealth gap, and derive profit from pain.
When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.
Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity—a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.
In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. Using a multigenerational narrative, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.
REVIEWS:
"Plundered combines meticulous research and a powerful multi-generational narrative to lift the veil on the ruthless consequences of racist housing policies and expose faulty victim-blaming discourses. Clear. Accessible. Compelling."―Ibram X. Kendi, author of Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist
"By telling two family stories—the Bucci’s and the Browns’—in one American city, Bernadette Atuahene puts a face on the pain of racist policies that have impoverished our democracy. Plundered is a compelling achievement of groundbreaking scholarship that you can imagine playing out on a movie screen."―Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, author of White Poverty and cochair of the Poor People's Campaign
"In this important and timely book, one of the world’s leading experts on property rights brings to light a secret hidden in plain sight; the bureaucratic machinery that maintains and widens the racial wealth gap in our country. Bernadette Atuahene tells this story across generations, following the descendants of two sharecroppers who settled in Detroit, one white and one black, revealing how racist tax policies fill government coffers while taking bread out of the mouths of the poor. Plundered puts flesh on the statistics and calls our attention to a problem few people knew to look for, revealing the routine nature of what Atuahene aptly calls predatory governance. I won’t think of property tax policy or the functions of government in the same way again."―Reuben Jonathan Miller, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration
"Plundered is an in-depth, human-centered analysis of how the property tax regime undermined Black homeownership in Detroit. Through vivid and complex narratives of the actors in this drama, Bernadette Atuahene shows how a ‘predatory system’ of policies and processes sustained and deepened racial inequality. This is one of the best books I have read that makes concrete one of the many ‘systemic’ barriers that continue to bedevil African Americans in their pursuit of wealth and intergenerational mobility. Based on her active engagement to dismantle these barriers, Atuahene does not only analyze the problem, but she provides us the roadmap to solve it. A tour de force of social science, legal studies, and social change."―Melvin L. Oliver, co-author of Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality and Former president of Pitzer College
"At a time when access to home ownership seems out of reach for so many, Plundered makes clear that this sad state of affairs is the result of a series of systemic failures—much of it aided by government policies. In clear, trenchant prose, Atuahene tells us how we got here and the remedies that are needed if we are to move forward. Plundered is a clear-eyed account of the past and a roadmap for a more equitable future."―Melissa Murray, New York Times bestselling co-author of The Trump Indictments and Stokes Professor of Law at New York University
"In this masterful interplay of ethnography, history, and truth-telling, Professor Atuahene lays bare the racist policies that rob Black families of their homes and undermine Black communities in Detroitand across the United States. Plundered offers a powerful new framework for recognizing—and dismantling—systemic racism."―Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and Torn Apart and Professor at University of Pennsylvania
"Plundered is a startling account of the intergenerational consequences of predatory public governance in America. This study of illegal and excessive property tax assessment is a surprising page-turner, moving, suspenseful, and beautifully told. Bernadette Atuahene begins with the dramatically personal story of two families whose grandfathers migrated to Detroit in the 1920’s to escape impoverishment: one fleeing Italy’s mezzadria system of indenture, the other running from North Carolina’s violent sharecropping culture of life-sapping labor. Both had no assets to start with. Both found jobs in the auto industry. Both arrived with equal levels of hope, persistence, and determined work ethic. But structures of violently enforced racial segregation drove them into different residential geographies and radically different intergenerational legacies of wealth: the descendants of the African American grandfather still live with the wealth transfers and layered obstructions of blocked access to union membership, federal redlining in mortgage lending, racially restrictive covenants, unavailability of homeowners’ insurance, extortive rates of car insurance, predatory lending practices, selective policing, shockingly inflated property tax assessments, and rampant illegality in foreclosure practices. Plundered reveals a century’s worth of punitively racialized policies that turned one city from a population of homeowners into a population largely of renters, squatters, and the tragically dispossessed. It is a tale of purposefully crafted inequality–a tale of outright government theft yet hiding in plain sight."―Patricia J. Williams, MacArthur Genius fellow and author of the Alchemy of Race and Rights
“Atuahene…braids personal stories with an analysis of Detroit’s policies on real property to produce an engaging and informative assessment of yet another way that racism permeates American society… Her attention to 'predatory governance,' her revelations of how investors, speculators, slumlords, and governments benefit from property tax injustice, and her acknowledgment of the difficulty of providing safe and affordable homes in Detroit earn her book further praise. As for who is responsible, she is clear: 'Individual efforts are no match for broken systems.' An eye-opening examination of property tax and how it factored into racial injustice.”―Kirkus Reviews
“Atuahene evocatively demonstrates how inequitable taxation contributed, along with redlining and other racist policies, to the families’ divergent paths. It’s a vital addition to the literature on housing inequality in America.”―Publishers Weekly
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Bernadette Atuahene is a Harvard and Yale trained property law scholar whose work focuses on land and homes stolen from Black people. She currently holds the Duggan Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Atuahene has served as a judicial clerk at the South African Constitutional Court, worked as a consultant for the South African Land Claims Commission, and practiced at a global law firm called Cleary Gottlieb. She is the author of We Want What’s Ours: Learning from South Africa’s Land Restitution Program, and she directed and produced an award-winning short documentary film about one South African family’s struggle to regain their land. Atuahene has won several accolades and has published extensively in both academic journals and news outlets such as the New York Times and LA Times.
Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery
by Seth Rockman
University of Chicago Press, 2024
[Publication date: November 29, 2024]
An eye-opening rethinking of nineteenth-century American history that reveals the interdependence of the Northern industrial economy and Southern slave labor.
The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.
By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.
REVIEWS:
“Rather than casting the antebellum US as a region of slave interests and a region of freedom, this narrative is focused on the material interests that united them. Ideologically they opposed each other, but the project of national economic unification based on regional specialisms was a success. Together, the regions accepted that slavery provided them with a way to climb out of Britain’s shadow until they were strong enough to argue that they were now enslaved to each other.”
The industrializing North and the agricultural South—that’s how we have been taught to think about the United States in the early nineteenth century. But in doing so, we overlook the economic ties that held the nation together before the Civil War. We miss slavery’s long reach into small New England communities, just as we fail to see the role of Northern manufacturing in shaping the terrain of human bondage in the South. Using plantation goods—the shirts, hats, hoes, shovels, shoes, axes, and whips made in the North for use in the South—historian Seth Rockman locates the biggest stories in American history in the everyday objects that stitched together the lives and livelihoods of Americans—white and Black, male and female, enslaved and free—across an expanding nation.
By following the stories of material objects, such as shoes made by Massachusetts farm women that found their way to the feet of a Mississippi slave, Rockman reveals a national economy organized by slavery—a slavery that outsourced the production of its supplies to the North, and a North that outsourced its slavery to the South. Melding business and labor history through powerful storytelling, Plantation Goods brings northern industrialists, southern slaveholders, enslaved field hands, and paid factory laborers into the same picture. In one part of the country, entrepreneurs envisioned fortunes to be made from “planter’s hoes” and rural women spent their days weaving “negro cloth” and assembling “slave brogans.” In another, enslaved people actively consumed textiles and tools imported from the North to contest their bondage. In between, merchants, marketers, storekeepers, and debt collectors laid claim to the profits of a thriving interregional trade.
Examining producers and consumers linked in economic and moral relationships across great geographic and political distances, Plantation Goods explores how people in the nineteenth century thought about complicity with slavery while showing how slavery structured life nationwide and established a modern world of entrepreneurship and exploitation. Rockman brings together lines of American history that have for too long been told separately, as slavery and capitalism converge in something as deceptively ordinary as a humble pair of shoes.
REVIEWS:
“Rather than casting the antebellum US as a region of slave interests and a region of freedom, this narrative is focused on the material interests that united them. Ideologically they opposed each other, but the project of national economic unification based on regional specialisms was a success. Together, the regions accepted that slavery provided them with a way to climb out of Britain’s shadow until they were strong enough to argue that they were now enslaved to each other.”
― Times Literary Supplement
"Beautifully written, incredibly researched, and shows us a single, entwined economy north and south—through the lives and work of men and women in New England who produced goods like shoes and clothing and tools for people enslaved on southern plantations, and the people who were their enforced consumers. It will make you think differently about how objects take on and then promote meanings, including multifaceted racism."
― Scholarly Kitchen, Best Books of 2024
"Seth Rockman is one of the most creative and original American historians writing today, as Plantation Goods richly demonstrates. He casts a brilliant new light on the deeply studied subjects of slavery and capitalism."
-- Marcus Rediker, author of The Slave Ship
"By pursuing a method of 'follow the things,' adopting an innovative narrative structure, and analyzing a rich collection of archival and material evidence, Seth Rockman deftly unpacks the culture and commerce of plantation goods that perniciously shaped racial 'knowledge' while making fortunes and channeling labor. This stunning study overflows with penetrating yet sensitive insights, capturing the nuanced experiences and interlocking relationships that formed a tainted yet consequential trans-regional enterprise."
-- Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried: the Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
"Rockman has given us a brilliant book that shows how slavery permeated the American landscape. Clearly written and deeply researched, Plantation Goods is a much-needed contribution to the study of the institution that helped define early America and, therefore, helped make us who we are today."
-- Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
"Plantation Goods is the most satisfying history of commodities and one of the most multidimensional histories of slavery I have ever read, embracing as it does consumers, workers, and manufacturers. Critics of the 'slavery's capitalism' framework have sometimes asked, what about the northern economy? Here is the answer, and so much more. Bold yet careful, precise, and thoughtful, Rockman shucks off overreach and sensationalism to deliver the goods."
-- David Waldstreicher, author of Slavery's Constitution and The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley
"In this remarkable book, Seth Rockman shows how close attention to the circulation of material goods related to slavery—agricultural implements, clothing supplied to slaves by their owners, whips, and the like—sheds new light on the complex economic connections between northern manufacturers and southern purchasers. Rockman reminds us of the central role played by slavery in the evolution of American capitalism, and how the hope of liberating slaves' purchasing power contributed to abolition."
-- Eric Foner, author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Seth Rockman is associate professor of history at Brown University. He is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore and coeditor of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. Rockman serves on the faculty advisory board of Brown University’s Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He lives in Providence.
