Milliken v. Bradley

Milliken v. Bradley
Supreme Court of the United States
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 (more) 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
Case opinions
Majority	Burger, joined by Stewart, Blackmun, Powell, Rehnquist
Concurrence	Stewart
Dissent	Douglas
Dissent	White, joined by Douglas, Brennan, Marshall
Dissent	Marshall, joined by Douglas, Brennan, White
Laws applied
U.S. Const. amend. XIV

Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), was a significant United States Supreme Court case dealing with the planned desegregation 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 following the Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) decision.

The ruling clarified the distinction between de jure and de facto segregation, confirming that segregation was allowed if it was not considered an explicit policy of each school district. In particular, the Court held that the school systems were not responsible for desegregation across district lines unless it could be shown that they had each deliberately engaged in a policy of segregation. The case did not expand on Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 402 U.S. 1 (1971), the first major Supreme Court case concerning school busing.

Brown v. Board was a landmark ruling, but difficult to implement. The case also did not take into account many sources of segregation in the US, including an ongoing migration of blacks into cities but not suburbs, and policies and practices that barred non-whites from suburban housing. By the 1970s, many urban school districts had super-majorities of black students.Educational segregation was therefore widespread, with informal racial barriers (i.e. "whites only") in the form of numerous thinly disguised practices that opposed blacks living in suburbs.

Metro-Detroit is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. During the Great Migration, the city gained a large black population, which was excluded upon arrival from white neighborhoods. This exclusion was enforced by economic discrimination (redlining), exclusionary clauses in property deeds, as well as direct violence (destruction of property including arson and bombings, as well as direct assault). Some of the discriminatory policies in Detroit ended as public awareness increased and became more sensitive to the national civil rights movement, which began after World War II, and as black voting power in city precincts increased. The changes allowed blacks to move into additional neighborhoods in the City, but some neighborhoods resisted and for the most part little or no change of segregative practices occurred in the suburbs.