Milliken v. Bradley - Supreme Court Blocks Cross-District School Desegregation, Entrenches White Flight

On July 25, 1974, the Supreme Court issued its 5-4 ruling in Milliken v. Bradley, effectively ending meaningful school desegregation efforts across metropolitan America by prohibiting cross-district busing remedies to address urban-suburban segregation. The decision exempted wealthy white suburbs from any obligation to remedy segregation patterns they benefited from, entrenching a two-tiered educational system that persists to this day.

The case arose from Detroit, where a federal district court found that state actions—including housing policies, school site selection, and attendance boundaries—had created unconstitutional segregation. Because Detroit was 70% Black while surrounding suburbs were 90% white, Judge Stephen Roth ordered a metropolitan-wide remedy involving 53 suburban districts. Chief Justice Warren Burger, writing for the Nixon-appointed majority, overturned this remedy, holding that suburban districts could not be included unless they were proven to have committed constitutional violations.

Justice Thurgood Marshall’s dissent was scathing: “In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into two cities—one white, the other Black—but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret.” Marshall understood that the decision would guarantee perpetual segregation, as white families could escape integration simply by moving across district lines.

The ruling devastated urban school systems nationwide. Within a decade, Detroit’s white student population dropped from 30% to under 10%. Similar patterns emerged in Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and cities throughout the North, where white flight to suburbs drained tax bases and left urban districts with concentrated poverty and inadequate resources. The decision created perverse incentives: the more effectively a city tried to integrate, the more white families fled to suburban districts immune from desegregation orders.

Milliken established that America’s residential apartheid—itself created through decades of federal housing policies, restrictive covenants, and discriminatory lending—would translate directly into educational apartheid. By allowing district boundaries to serve as barriers to integration, the Court ensured that Brown v. Board’s promise of equal educational opportunity would remain unfulfilled for most Black children. The decision represents judicial capture in service of white supremacy, deliberately protecting the privileges white suburbs gained through discriminatory housing policies while forcing urban Black communities to bear the full burden of remedying segregation they did not create.