Milliken v. Bradley

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Milliken v. Bradley

Argued February 27, 1974
Decided July 25, 1974


Full case name:	Milliken, Governor of Michigan, et al. v. Bradley, et al.

Citations:	418 U.S. 717; 94 S. Ct. 3112; 41 L. Ed. 2d 1069; 1974 U.S. LEXIS 94

Prior history:	Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit

Holding

The Court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education.

Court membership

Chief Justice: Warren E. Burger
Associate Justices: William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan, Potter Stewart, Byron White, Thurgood Marshall, Harry Blackmun, Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., William Rehnquist

Case opinions

Majority by: Burger
Joined by: Stewart, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist
Concurrence by: Stewart
Dissent by: Douglas
Dissent by: White
Joined by: Douglas, Brennan, Marshall
Dissent by: Marshall
Joined by: Douglas, Brennan, White

Laws applied

U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was an important United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned forced busing of public school students across district lines among 53 school districts in metropolitan Detroit. It concerned the plans to integrate public schools in the United States in the aftermath of the Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) decision.

It placed an important limitation on the first major Supreme Court case concerning school busing, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), by holding that such remedies could extend across district lines only where there was actual evidence that multiple districts had deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation.

[edit] Decision of the Court

In a 5-to-4 decision, the Court held that "[w]ith no showing of significant violation by the 53 outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect," the district court's remedy was "wholly impermissible" and not justified by Brown v. Board of Education. The Court noted that desegregation, "in the sense of dismantling a dual school system," did not require "any particular racial balance in each 'school, grade or classroom.'" The Court also emphasized the importance of local control over the operation of schools.

This decision exempted suburban districts from assisting in the desegregation of inner-city school systems, and subsequently reinforced the existing trend of "white flight" from cities to suburban school districts. In other terms, the Court implicitly corraled Brown by limiting Brown's holding to the banning of de jure coercive intradistrict segregation, while allowing de facto segregation by school district lines that resulted from voluntary residential segregation.

Justice Douglas' dissenting opinion held that:

"Today's decision ... means that there is no violation of the Equal Protection Clause though the schools are segregated by race and though the black schools are not only separate but inferior."

"Michigan by one device or another has over the years created black school districts and white school districts, the task of equity is to provide a unitary system for the affected area where, as here, the State washes its hands of its own creations."

Legal historian Lawrence Friedman explained the impact of Milliken as follows:

The world was made safe for white flight. White suburbs were secure in their grassy enclaves .... Official, legal segregation indeed was dead; but what replaced it was a deeper, more profound segregation ... Tens of thousands of black children attend schools that are all black, schools where they never see a white face; and they live massed in ghettos which are also entirely black.^[1]

Despite the Court's decision in Milliken, court-supervised school desegregation plans were implemented regularly throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and remain in effect in a handful of U.S. cities and metropolitan areas as of 2006.