Opinion: ‘Brown’ Banned School Segregation. In 1974, ‘Milliken’ Made It Harder to Stop

“The Detroit-only plan simply has no hope of achieving actual desegregation. … Under such a plan, white and Negro students will not go to school together. Instead, Negro children will continue to attend all-Negro schools. The very evil that Brown was aimed at will not be cured but will be perpetuated.”

– Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting opinion in Milliken v. Bradley , July 25, 1974

This year, Americans marked the 70th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ended legal segregation of public schools. It’s one of the Supreme Court’s most famous rulings and certainly its best-known education-related case. In many ways, though, Milliken v. Bradley — decided 50 years ago, in July 1974 — has more to teach about the current state of American education and what it would take to truly realize Brown ’s promise of integrated schools and equal educational opportunity for all.

If Brown was the green light for school integration in America, Milliken — which addressed the question of whether the federal courts could require regional integration plans across district lines — became something of a flashing red. In overruling the cross-district remedies that lower courts deemed essential for true integration in metropolitan Detroit, the Supreme Court significantly limited the ability of the federal courts to order predominantly white suburban districts to integrate with predominantly black urban ones.

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As Marshall sadly predicted, schools today are more segregated than they were when he wrote his dissent, with most of that segregation occurring between school districts rather than within them. Indeed, a whopping 97% of the intense school segregation in the Detroit area stems from demographic differences between neighboring or nearby districts — a direct legacy of Milliken .

But the decision did not prevent states from adjusting district lines or taking other steps to promote cross-district integration. That’s exactly what they should do now.

The organization I co-founded, Brown’s Promise, has developed a comprehensive state policy agenda laying out concrete strategies for state leaders, advocates, policymakers and practitioners. States could, for example, transform school funding formulas to allocate resources according to a school’s needs rather than local property values. Or they could create interdistrict transfer programs and public magnet schools, like those that have fostered diverse classrooms in Hartford, Connecticut. States could also require districts to create plans for promoting integrated, well-funded schools within districts and schools, and systematically track their progress toward meeting those goals.

Achieving this sort of state policy change should not require litigation, but history teaches that legal action is necessary for forcing integration in American schools. Several active lawsuits offer a promising roadmap. Students, families and organizations in Minnesota, New Jersey and New York have filed lawsuits arguing that their states have a duty under their state constitutions to address segregation in their public schools. In Minnesota, for example, the state Supreme Court’s most recent ruling in the ongoing Cruz-Guzman school desegregation case underscored the state’s responsibility to address educational inequalities caused by segregation without requiring proof that the state intentionally promoted it. In New Jersey, the Latino Action Network’s school desegregation lawsuit has moved to mediation , seeking remedies after a judge found the state did not address racial segregation in 23 districts . And an appellate court recently cleared the way for a suit challenging segregation in New York City public schools to proceed.

These legal challenges are complemented by growing momentum in research, advocacy and community organizing around the country. In New York, IntegrateNYC is turning to youth leaders to light the way toward integrated, equitable schools. Earlier this year, New America released an innovative, interactive tool that allows educators, policymakers and advocates to explore how district lines separate students from resources, opportunity and each other. And leading researchers at Stanford and USC recently published eye-opening new data about the state of segregation in American public schools.

That research paints a bleak picture of a public school system that has, for decades now, been trending back toward segregation. Indeed, as legal scholar Martha Minow has noted, “ Milliken marked the beginning of the end of serious efforts to desegregate America’s public schools .” But that does not have to be the end of the story. A new generation of students, educators, advocates and judges now have the chance to author a new chapter.