Revisting Milliken vs. Bradley
When you leave your home every morning for work or school, do you think about “where” you live as you close the door?
Do you think about the schools your children attend, your access to quality medical treatment, your reliance on reliable public transportation or simply your safety as you walk through you neighborhood. For many of us, privileged folk, we never, never need to think of the answers to these questions. It never enters our mind.
Where a person lives should not determine how he or she lives, or if he or she lives. The reality is that place matters.
The history of housing in Detroit is grounded in institutional and structural racism. Beginning in 1934, the Federal Housing Administration began a systematic practice of “redlining”, that is, the practice of not guaranteeing loans in areas where people of “Ethiopian descent” resided. That phrase is taken directly from the FHA manual. Redlining along with restrictive covenants and steering by realtors prevented African-Americans from living in white areas, in areas of prosperity and growth. We even have a wall near Eight Mile and Wyoming that divided White and Black neighborhoods. So while we in the North watched fire hoses and dogs being used on our Black brothers and sisters in the South, we were using our laws, policies and courts to prevent people of color from gaining access and opportunity to a home and a better life. Let’s think about what that piece of the American dream-home ownership-gets one. Over 75% of people’s wealth is in their home. At one time, we could borrow against it for home improvements or to send a child to college or bequeath it to our children so that any one of them could have a home or the value of it. That was not possible for African-Americans here.
So let’s circle back to my opening questions. Where you live determines the quality of education for your children. It determines your child’s safety as he or she attends school. Reflecting back on this court decision, one can only wonder how the quality of education has been affected in Detroit. What would it look like today? At a re-enactment of this momentous case at Thomas M. Cooley Law School last Fall, a group of Central High School students attending asked, “If one vote was cast differently, you mean I may have had a better educational opportunity?”
Interestingly, we are having this debate again today. Gov. Rick Snyder has proposed to allow any Michigan student to attend any public school in Michigan. Given the major moves in Lansing to erase all sorts of so-called “local control” issues, this should not be controversial.
But it has. And, quite frankly, those opposed to are doing verbal backflips to avoid speaking the real reason for their opposition. Just as in the 1970s, they don’t want black kids in their schools. End of story.
Access to quality housing and education go hand in hand. This region, so divided by housing segregation, and now by education segregation, will not return to prosperity unless we create access and opportunity for all. We need to move away from thinking that if one group is uplifted, then I must be losing something, or I am in some way negatively impacted. Instead, the thought must be that we are all uplifted.
I use history, not to blame or point fingers. I use history to illuminate the present. In the words of Professor john powell at The Ohio State University, “Our fates are linked, and our futures are common”. That is the simple answer, but the task is daunting.
