Tag: busing

09/21/25

A Bus Too Far



Summer 2025
MYRON MAGNET

Beneath the righteous, reforming passion of the civil rights era that suffuses Michelle Adams’s The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, one can’t help perceiving how unexamined and sometimes simplistic the University of Michigan constitutional law professor’s fundamental assumptions are. Consequently, after closing this painstakingly argued tome, the reader almost inevitably thinks past its conclusion—pondering, beyond the particular failure of the civil rights movement that Adams laments, the radical way that movement changed American society not only for the better but also for the worse.

The Containment tells the story of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision against school busing in Milliken v. Bradley (1974), from its beginnings as a district court case in 1970 to its epilogue in the high court’s Milliken II ruling in 1977. Adams sets the stage with a fiery 1967 debate at the Detroit Board of Education about how to reform the city’s awful public schools, which had been majority black since 1963. Asking why black pupils were disproportionally failing and dropping out, Albert B. Cleage, Jr., pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna and an admirer of Malcolm X, highlighted white teachers and principals as the problem. They systematically destroy black kids’ “self-image and racial pride,” making them feel intellectually inferior and sapping their motivation. The last thing these kids need is more integration. What they need is community control of their schools, with black parents overseeing the hiring and firing of black teachers and vetting the curriculum, textbooks, and discipline. This prescription was part of Cleage’s larger vision of a black “nation within a nation,” in which blacks would own and patronize their own businesses, professional services, and farms, set their own goals, and forge their own culture.

Hotly opposing Cleage’s black nationalism was the civil rights orthodoxy backed by the board’s future president, Abraham Zwerdling, a white labor lawyer and longtime National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) member. He and his liberal board allies espoused the argument underlying the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision, which held—based on psychologist Kenneth Clark’s flimsy study of black kids’ preferences for white dolls over black ones—that segregation, by separating black children from their white peers, did them deep emotional harm, generating “a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.” Separate schools, therefore, were inherently, unconstitutionally unequal, and integration was the sine qua non for black educational success. Continue reading →

02/1/20

Clarence Thomas: the Movie

Clarence Thomas: the Movie
Don’t miss this new documentary.
Myron Magnet
January 31, 2020

From a kerosene-lit shanty in a Georgia swamp to the Supreme Court bench is almost as meteoric a rise as from a log cabin to the White House, and if you add in overcoming segregation in the days when the KKK marched openly down Savannah’s main street, it’s closer still. Michael Pack’s riveting documentary on Justice Clarence Thomas, Created Equal—opening in theaters this week and airing on PBS in May—movingly captures the uncompromising ethic that propelled the justice’s career past so many obstacles as it distills 30 hours of interviews with Thomas and his wife, Virginia, into what feels not only like the exemplary life story of an underappreciated hero but also like a laser-focused, two-hour account of our nation’s race relations over the last 70 years. Yes, we overcame, but at a cost—of which Justice Thomas paid more than his fair share.

The film is purely biographical—Thomas’s brilliant jurisprudence plays no role here—and the justice’s somberly eloquent, slightly melancholy recounting of his saga as he faces the camera directly, dark-suited, with starched white shirt and monochromatic necktie, closely follows the style of his bestselling memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. But as Thomas tells his story, Pack shows us haunting images, over a nostalgically evocative American musical score—bluegrass guitars and banjos, jazz, and Louis Armstrong longingly singing “Moon River” (with lyrics by Savannah-born Johnny Mercer, Thomas reminds us)—that bring it all even more vividly to life than the excellent memoir does. The film clips of the mazy creeks around Thomas’s birthplace, the coastal Georgia hamlet of Pin Point—founded by freed slaves just after the Civil War—sometimes seen from above, as in the iconic shot toward the end of The African Queen, and sometimes seen as we travel along them in one of the little “bateaux” that the oystermen and crab fishers of that lush and remote outpost on the very edge of America still use, bring home how “far removed in time and space” it was from modern, urban America, as Thomas puts it.

It was a completely different world—a tiny, poor, all black community of jumbled shacks around the cinderblock workshop where the women picked the crabs and shucked the oysters that the men caught and raked. The still photos Pack found from the 1940s show you a preindustrial world so vanished that it could just as easily be the nineteenth century as the twentieth. Descended from West Africans, Thomas and his neighbors spoke a dialect called Gullah or Geechee, incomprehensible to outsiders; but when Pack shows us a film clip of a woman singing that patois as she feeds her chickens, we grasp viscerally from the creole lilt how this corner of America was a link in Britain’s triangle trade, with ships bringing enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and southern colonies, carrying the sugar north for distillation into rum, and returning to Britain to sell it.

For Thomas and his playfellows, this was a Mark Twain world of improvised games in the woods and swamps, with no such thing as a store-bought toy—until the heartbreakingly tiny, jerrybuilt shack where he lived with his mother, older sister, and little brother burned down. He came home to “just ashes and twisted tin,” he says. “Everything that you ever knew in life is just there—I mean, it’s smoldering.” Continue reading →