David Riddle (2000) - Race and Reaction in Warren, Michigan, 复制

Race and Reaction in Warren, Michigan, 1971 to 1974: ’’Bradley v .
Milliken” and the Cross-

District Busing Controversy
Author(s): David Riddle
Source: Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Fall, 2000), p p . 1 - 4 9
Published b y : Central Michigan University
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Race and Reaction in Warren, Michigan,
,
1971 to 1974: Bradley v. Milliken and the
e
Cross-District Busing Controversy 1
g
by
David Riddle e
In the spring of 1971 the Detroit branch of the NAACP sued the
e
Detroit Board of Education, triggering a protracted political and legal battle
and a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that changed the course of school
l
desegregation in the United States. The civil rights group charged that for
r
years the board had pursued policies that harmed black students and
d
teachers in the Detroit school system. Not only did the school board spend
d
disproportionately more of its building and maintenance budget on schools
s
in white neighborhoods, but also students from overcrowded black schools
s
were routinely bused around “white schools” and reassigned to the nearest
“black school.” The school system also maintained separate seniority lists for
black and white teachers, and black teachers seldom taught white students.
Federal District Judge Stephen J. Roth heard the case. During forty-
one days of testimony from 6 April through 22 July 1971 the NAACP
lawyers presented evidence that racial segregation had occurred and that it
was de jure (the result of deliberate government action). Attorneys for the
e
Detroit Board of Education argued that the current school board was
committed to desegregation and had already instituted appropriate reforms.
On 27 September 1971 Judge Roth ruled that the NAACP had proved its
s
case. Until June of 1972 the judge considered plans to desegregate the
school system. It was becoming clear, however, that there would soon be
e
too few white students in the Detroit school system to bring about
t
meaningful desegregation. (Black students already made up 65 percent of
the total student population, and white enrollment was dropping fast.)
Responding to the pleas of attorney Alexander Ritchie, who represented
d
the parents of the dwindling population of white students in the
e
Detroit school system, Judge Roth took what turned out to be a
disastrous gamble in June 1972. He ordered the two-way busing
. g
1
This article is adapted from R. David Riddle, “The Rise of the ‘Reagan Democrats’
'
in Warren, Michigan, 1964-1984” (Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1998): 180-250.
, g , . . ., , .
Michigan Historical Revtevc 26:2 (Fall 2000): 1-49
9
© 2000 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686
g y. 6
All Rights Reserved.
.
2 Michigan Historical Review
g w
of white and black students in fifty-three school districts (including

g
Detroit) in southeastern Michigan. Some 780,000 students were involved,
,
220,000 of them in the Detroit school district. It was the widest-ranging
g g
busing order ever handed down by a federal court.
As news and rumors circulated in the months leading up to the
e
ruling, a mass protest movement sprang up in the affected suburbs. The
city of Warren turned out to be an especially strong focus of opposition
to busing. With 180,000 residents and six school districts, Warren was
the third largest city in Michigan; its economy was heavily dependent on
n
the auto industry. The median age of its residents was in the low
twenties, and many families had young children and had chosen to live in
g n
Warren because of its good schools.
Warren already had a contentious relationship with the federal
l
government. In 1970 the city had tangled with the Department of
f
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) over the issue of open
housing. A compliance check conducted by the Chicago HUD office in
n
connection with Warren’s application for a housing grant revealed that
although one- third of the jobs in the big automotive plants in Warren
were held by black autoworkers, a mere handful had bought houses
there. Racial steering by real estate brokers was part of the reason. But
t
Warren also had a reputation for using violence and intimidation against
African Americans trying to buy houses there. Black homebuyers who
ignored the warnings ran the risk of verbal harassment, cross burnings,
stink bombs, broken windows, and arson attacks, with the Warren Police
e
Department strangely unable to make even one arrest. HUD held up
Warren’s grant application pending the city’s adoption of remedial
measures to bring it into compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and
the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The HUD controversy ended with a grass-
s
roots referendum directing the city to withdraw its grant request for the
e
HUD money. Warren’s voters had chosen to forgo the federal funds
rather than comply with open housing. Just five months later, Judge
mon s a er, u ge
Roth began hearing testimony in the NAACP case.2
2
Warren’s reputation for racism and occasional violence was belied by
the sweet-tempered naivete of some of the people who lived there.
.
Carmella Sabaugh was a young mother with two children less than five
g an ve
2
For the HUD affair, see R. David Riddle, “HUD and the Open Housing
g
Controversy of 1970 in Warren, Michigan,” Michigan Historical Review 24, no. 2 (Fall 1998):
:
1-30. For Warren’s reputation, see Tony Zineski and Michael Kenyon, “Where the
e
Racism Really Is—in the Suburbs,” Detroit Scope Magazine,31 August 1968, 6-10.
, p g , g , - .
The Cross-District Fusing Controversy 3
g y
years old when she moved to Warren from Detroit. She and her family
Hved near 11 Mile Road and Schoenherr, on the east side of town. Her
husband commuted to work in Detroit, where he taught school. Her
neighbors also were young. “There were a lot of new homes being built at
that time, and a lot of new families from the Detroit area moved up. . . . It
t
was a young community,” she remembers. Her children were too young
for school when they moved to Warren, and during the next five years she
had three more. She recalls the traditional families in her neighborhood.
“All the mothers were at home with the children. . . . The husbands were
working. . . . I was totally immersed in raising the family.” Although
nobody had a lot of money, people were happy to be bound up in their
family responsibilities. Carmella enjoyed the back-fence camaraderie she
shared with her new neighbors. She found, in conversations over coffee,
that she shared the simple and innocent expectations of her friends. “You
u
had this nice, new house, . . . you were supposed to raise your family and
d
go to church. . . . Pretty much, things were going to be good.” There was a
sense that Warren offered a protective environment for raising children.
g .
The congestion and dangers of the city seemed far away.3
To its new residents, Warren seemed ideal for bringing up a family.
O f course it did lack some amenities. Its acres of sprawling tract housing
offered little in the way of organized recreation. There were few parks.
Children’s exercise opportunities were limited to school gyms,
subdivision streets, and driveway basketball hoops. A 1971 HUD study
on housing needs ranked the lack of recreational facilities second (behind
d
traffic congestion) in residents’ concerns as a “serious problem.” 4
4
O n the other hand, the city had plenty of schools. Margaret Sinclair
remembers moving to Warren in 1955: “The thing I really liked about
the location was that there was a working farm behind us, and right next
t
to the farm was a school. And that’s what attracted us to that
subdivision.” In fact, Warren had six different school districts, some of
which overlapped and served other communities. The reason for this
s
lack of fit between the school districts and the municipalities was that
most of the school districts predated the cities. The districts had grown
out of one-room rural schools that served the farming population when
gp p n
3
Carmella Sabaugh, interview by author, tape recording, Mt. Clemens, Mich., 28
g , y , p g, . , ., 8
January 1997.
4
Warren, Michigan Community Renewal Program Michigan R-175 (CR) Final Report, March
1971 (Mishawaka, Indiana: City Planning Associates, 1971), 33, 20-21.
, y g , , , .
g
the area was a township prior to suburban development and municipal

pp
incorporation in 1957. 5
5
For some Warren residents the school districts were the most
important community boundaries, even after Warren became a city.
.
People identified where they lived by the name of their school district.
.
One longtime resident observed, “The old-timers still do. They live in
n
Van Dyke; they live in Fitzgerald. They identify with the school system
more than with the city sometimes. They went through these schools
and their kids did.” This community identification in terms of the school
l
districts was evident in the way that the Warren sports programs pitted
one city high school in friendly competition against another. “Warren’s
s
neighborhoods then were very close-knit,” remembers one city official.
“We had six school districts and, at that time, we had our own athletic
conference. Within the city of Warren we had nine high schools. All our
g . r
games were basically played inside the city of Warren.”6
g 6
In the late 1960s and early 1970s the people of Warren generally
y
supported their schools. Most of them believed that the schools were e
doing a good job. The 1971 attitude survey found that only 4.1 percent
of the residents felt that the quality of the schools posed a problem for
r
the city. The survey also showed that the respondents felt that the
e
schools were conveniently located. Fewer than 5 percent listed
“convenience of schools” as a major problem.7
The school systems were funded through property taxes,
supplemented by grants from the state. The level of state aid varied,
depending on whether the school district’s real estate tax base per
student was above or below the state average. Even with state assistance,
though, the burden of school funding fell unequally upon residents of
Warren’s different school districts. Some districts, Eke Fitzgerald in south
h
Warren, could rely on manufacturing property for part of their school
taxes. Others, Eke Warren Woods on the city’s east side, depended
d
almost entirely upon residential property taxes. Another factor affecting
g
the tax base was the gradual aging of Warren’s population. The median
age rose from 24.5 in 1960 to 35.7 in 1990. Many older taxpayers Eved on
fixed incomes and their children were already grown. They were
understandably harder to convince to vote for a raise in school millage rates.
un ers an a y ar er o conv nce o v g es.
5
Margaret Sinclair, telephone interview by author, tape recording, 29 January 1997.
6
Marilyn Donalin, interview by author, tape recording, Warren, Mich., 30 January
y
1997; Mark Steenberg, interview by author, tape recording, Warren, Mich., 25 February
g, , ., y
1997; Donald Binkowski to David Riddle, 4 January 1997.
7 .
Warren, Michigan Community Renewal Program, 20-21.
, g y g , .
The Cross-District Busing Controversy 5
g y
Thus, Warren’s school systems were undergoing complex fiscal pressures at

t
about the same time that cross-district busing became an issue.8
8
Complaints over taxes aside, the prevailing attitude in Warren in the
e
early 1960s was one of optimism. This bubble of suburban complacency
burst in July 1967, when a police raid on an after-hours bar on 12th Street
in Detroit resulted in four days of rioting, forty-three officially recorded
deaths, and between $80 million and $125 million in property damage.
Carmella Sabaugh’s suburban neighbors reacted with disbelief. She
remembers, “No one ever thought that there was a reason to riot. . . .
[Even] if they thought that the people were oppressed, they wouldn’t
think that this was a way to settle it.” The uprising called into question
the feeling of security that prevailed in the earlier years of suburban
setdement. It gave Warren’s people a “feeling of uneasiness about
Detroit, and where it was going. And now, they definitely wanted that
, y y
separation [between the cities].”9
9
In 1971, Arthur Johnson was the assistant superintendent in charge
of the Community Relations Commission of the Detroit Public School
system. Born in 1925 in Americus, Georgia, raised in Birmingham,
,
Alabama, and educated at Morehouse College, Johnson was an African-
n
American student activist pursuing graduate studies in sociology at Fisk
University in 1950 when the national NAACP invited him to head its
s
chapter in Detroit. As a student, Johnson had immersed himself in the
e
sociological thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP. He
had the intellectual foundation and the dignified bearing of that stratum
of black leaders, “the talented tenth,” on whom Du Bois rested his hopes
for the improvement of the black race. Johnson took up the challenge
and, although he planned to resume his college studies after only two or
three years in Detroit, served as the executive secretary of the Detroit
NAACP until 1964. O f his early years in Detroit, Johnson remembers:
“In that period, we were very much concerned with job discrimination,
housing segregation (which was very firmly fixed in Detroit), police
e
brutality, and we were always concerned with problems in education. The
y, y p . e
8
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population,1960, vol. 1, Characteristics of the
e
Population, Part 24, Michigan (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968),
table 20, 74; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Census of Population,1990, section 1 of 2, Social and
Economic Characteristics, Michigan (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1993),
table 169, 652; Robert Freehand, interview by author, tape recording, Warren, Mich., 27
February 1997; Richard Lange, interview by author, tape recording, Warren, Mich., 8
g , y , p g, , .,
February 1997.
9
Carmella Sabaugh, interview.
g , .
g w
school system . . . and problems of equal opportunity in education loomed

d
large, and we found ourselves giving increased attention to how to make
10 e
the public schools in Detroit serve black youngsters adequately.”
In the late 1950s the Detroit chapter of the NAACP began to focus
its attention on the Detroit school system. Beginning in 1956 with the
election to the school board of white liberal businessman Leonard Kasle
and Dr. Remus Robinson (Detroit’s first elected black officeholder), the
leadership of the school board consisted of a coalition of liberal, labor,
and civil-rights activists. Intent on reforming the school system and
d
extending its benefits to Detroit’s black citizens, this coalition inherited a
a
troubled school system. One immediate problem was the lack of
operating funds. The tax base eroded as industry and residents left the
city. Between 1958 and 1963, the assessed valuation of Detroit real estate
11
fell from $5.1. billion to $4.6
. billion.
.
A second problem, and an ever-present political challenge to the
e
liberal members of the school board, was the degree to which racial
l
privilege permeated every aspect of school administration. The attitude
of many white administrators and teachers toward black students in the
Detroit school system was one of neglect. The schools in the black
neighborhoods were falling apart. Not only were teachers assigned by
race, but the curriculum itself was racist. Perhaps the most devastating
g
policy was the channeling of black students into a “general track”
"
program that was little more than a holding pen for the black proletariat.
.
Black students were expected to get unskilled jobs in heavy industry or in
service work, jobs that required little academic or vocational instruction.
.
Even the apprenticeship programs run joindy by the school system, the
e
unions, and the employers— night classes that since the 1920s had
trained thousands of Detroit tool-and-die workers for well-paid jobs—
p s?
barred their doors to black students..12 2
10
Arthur Johnson, interview by author, tape recording, Detroit, Mich., 17 December 1996.
11
O n the flight of investment capital outside the city of Detroit, see Thomas J.
Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 125-52; Jeffrey Mirel, The Rise and Fall of an Urban School
System: Detroit, 1907-1981 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 217-21.
y 12
Mirel, Rise and Fall, 186-96, 229-50, 263, 275; George E. Bushnell, Jr., interview by
y
author, tape recording, Detroit, Mich., 9 January 1997. The white liberals on the school
board included businessman Leonard Kasle and United Automobile Workers (UAW)
)
attorney Abraham L. Zwerdling. On Zwerdling and other personalities on the school
board, see William R. Grant, “Community Control vs. School Integration in Detroit,” The
y . g , e
Public Interest 24 (Summer 1971): 62-79.
.
The Cross-District Busing Controversy
g y
7
It was with the understanding that these issues would be addressed

that Detroit’s black community had helped to elect the liberal board of
education beginning in the late 1950s. White liberals, black parents, and
d
community leaders worked together through the Citizens’ Advisory
y
Committee on School Needs to get millages passed. Led by a school
l
administrator, Norman Drachler (who would later succeed Samuel
Brownell as school superintendent), this alliance between white liberals
and the city’s black residents radically changed the school board’s focus.
Now the board commissioned studies and launched special programs for
black students. In the late 1950s and early 1960s Superintendent
Brownell initiated the Great Cities project that ran pilot programs in
seven Detroit schools, with 420 staff members and 10,400 students..133
White resistance to the school board’s new liberal agenda crystallized
d
when the board began transferring black children out of overcrowded
black schools into white schools. One incident occurred at the start of
the 1960-61 school year. The board decided to bus three hundred black
students from overcrowded inner-city schools to three majority-white
schools on Detroit’s northwest side. Hundreds of white parents in ad
d
hoc meetings demanded that the busing plans be scrapped and vowed to
keep their children home from school. The next day thirteen hundred
white students boycotted the schools. In the face of School
l
Superintendent Brownell’s threats to fine and jail parents for
contributing to the truancy of their children, the protests eventually died
down, but the three hundred black students were kept separated from
14 p p
the whites in their new schools.
.
The pressure to desegregate the schools continued to grow. By the
1960s black parents and students were in a state of near rebellion against
t
the Detroit Board of Education, even though the liberal majority on the
board agreed with many of the parents’ complaints. In the Sherrill
l
School controversy in January 1962, the emergency assignment of black
y y , g y g
13
Mirel, Rise and Fall, 65, 253-58. The
. board of education also redirected the e
school construction and repair programs to the previously neglected black
k
neighborhoods. It recruited and trained black teachers from the South and imposed a
a
moratorium on the purchase of textbooks while it fought publishers over racial bias
s
and generated its own teaching materials. The school board, with the support of the
e
Detroit Federation of Teachers, called a halt to the policy of assigning teachers and
d
principals on the basis of race, and it implemented a policy of affirmative action for
r
contractors doing business with the school board. Bushnell, interview; Johnson,
. , ,
interview..
14
Mirel, ,Rise and Fall,,259-61..
g
students from overcrowded schools to other black schools rather than to

majority-white Mackenzie High School led the black parents in Sherrill
School to sue the school board. By the mid-1960s it was African-
American students who were leading the protests against the school
l
system. Black students organized the Northern High School boycott of
April 1966. They denounced the lack of academic substance in their
school curriculum, pointing to the fact that the school had had a good
academic reputation in the days when it served white students. Their
ultimately successful demand that the school’s principal be reassigned
p p d
contributed to racial polarization in the city.15
con
A year later the Detroit uprising of July 1967 compounded the
difficulties of those pressing for school reform. The city’s black and
d
white populations were more estranged than ever. White flight was at full
l
throttle. Meanwhile the report card was coming due on the liberal
leadership of the Detroit Board of Education. The mounting frustration
n
of black Detroiters over falling scores in the standardized academic
performance tests administered to the city’s school children, plus the
fistfights that accompanied black enrollment at the city’s few remaining
g
predominantly white high schools, showed that a growing chasm divided
the city’s population, as well as its political leaders. The liberals’ position
. p
on the school board was becoming untenable.
The Detroit uprising brought to the fore a generation of black
k
leaders steeped in the theory of the internal colony and the rhetoric of
f
Black Nationalism. Its strategy for educational reform excluded any
coalition with whites. It went beyond an administrative and fiscal critique
e
of the school system and demanded black control of black schools. This
demand for “community control” of schools implied a new relationship
among the board of education, the teachers’ union, the students, and the
parents. But community control proved to be a hopelessly vague
concept. What eventually emerged from this clash of visions was
something called school decentralization.16
g . 6
15
Mirel, Rise and Fall, 261-63, 301-5. For the Sherrill School controversy and lawsuit,
see boxes 8-11, Ernest Goodman Papers, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs (hereafter
-
ALUA), Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.
16
Mirel, Rise andFall, 308-13. Since the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael, leader of the
- e
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, had been comparing the impoverished
d
and powerless situation of black people in America to the dependent and deformed
d
condition of Third World countries under U.S. imperialism. See Stokely Carmichael,
y ,
“Toward Black Liberation,” Massachusetts Review 7 (Autumn 1966).
owar ac , .
g y
The administrative problems of the underfunded Detroit school

l
system, plus white resistance to black enrollment in predominandy white
e
schools, convinced the city’s leaders that the system’s problems could be
better addressed if its administrative functions were divided intoo
geographic regions. In 1969 State Senator Coleman Young authored a
a
bill requiring the decentralization of the Detroit school system. 17
7
Decentralization became a panacea for the ills of the school system and
an alternative to the seemingly unattainable goal of integration. Arthur
Johnson believed that decentralization was born of the black
community’s despair that desegregation could ever be achieved in the
g g e n e
Detroit school system:
As we began to focus more and more on education problems .

. . there began to grow a sense of retreat and disenchantment
with the goal of integration. Black families began to say, “OK,
if we can’t have an integrated school system, then let us
control our own neighborhood schools.” And the idea of black
control of black schools soon became a rallying call. . . . Black
control of black schools became a political strategy that backed
away from school integration. In all fairness, all the efforts that
t
blacks had made to participate in integrated education were
e
frustrated. N o wonder they came to question integration as a
. q g
policy. 18
y.
The 1967 uprising also created a rift in the leadership of the black
community. Black nationalists like the Reverend Albert Cleage, Jr.,
,
demanded black control of black schools and criticized established civil
rights leaders like Arthur Johnson who remained committed to the
e
NAACP goal of complete integration of black people into American
society. Cleage and others accused black school board members Remus
Robinson and Arthur Johnson of having allowed themselves to be co-
o
opted by the white liberals on the board. Together with the white
parents’ entrenched defense of white schools, this split in the black
sp n e ack
leadership weakened the liberals on the school board.19
Notwithstanding these developments, the liberal leadership of the
board of education still pursued desegregation. Despite the 1969 passage
p g ga on. esp e e passage
17
Michigan Public Act 244 (1969).
18
Mirel, Rase and Fall, 308-9, 326, 347; quotation from Johnson, interview.
19 , q , w.
Mirel, ,Rise and Fall, ,332-35..
M g
of Public Act 244, which mandated the decentralization of Detroit

schools, the faction on the board led by white UAW attorney Abraham
Zwerdling continued to draw the school enrollment lines so as to include
black and white schools in the same regions. This did not alter the largely
y
segregated attendance lines for the schools, but it left open the possibility
y
of integrating the schools in the same region at some future time. Then in
n
March 1970, in response to pressure from black leaders and in order to
gain the vote of one black member of the school board, Zwerdling
g
proposed new attendance lines for eleven of the city’s twenty-two high
schools. This change would ultimately require the reassignment of nine
thousand high school students, both black and white, to new schools. On 7 7
April 1970 the school board voted 4 to 2 to adopt this integration plan.20
pr 0
The vote provoked an immediate protest in the white northwest and d
northeast corners of the city. Parents kept more than two thousand
d
students home from school. White neighborhood leaders called a
meeting at the Slovene Hall on the west side of Detroit and a new,
citywide group of white parents emerged. Taking the name “Citizens’
Committee for Better Education” (CCBE), the group elected twelve e
representatives from the east side and twelve from the west side of f
Detroit. The CCBE had the support of several active white parents’
'
groups as well as up to a dozen white homeowner groups. Edward
Zaleski, a Detroit police officer, was named temporary chairman. Aubrey
Short, a metallurgist employed at General Motors, later succeeded him as
chairman. An attorney in attendance at the meeting, Alexander Ritchie,
became a delegate at large and the group’s legal advisor. Ritchie was a
a
forty-eight-year-old lawyer with children in the school system. He was
raised in a working-class Detroit family of Scottish extraction. Like many
y
other white parents, Ritchie supported decentralization at that time:
o er w p , pp :
I sincerely believed . . . that a local school district, a small school

l
district, which gave the people in the neighborhood the
e
opportunity to go and express their concerns about principals, about
teachers, about curriculum, could be a far more effective instrument t
of public education than a massive school district where you had
people downtown who really didn’t give a damn. . . . After they got
down there in that elevated office . . . they were so remote from the
own ere n a e eva e o ... y
20
William R. Grant, “The Detroit School Case: An Historical Overview,” Wayne Raw
Review 21, no. 3 (March 1975): 854-57; Johnson, interview; Mirel, Rise and Fall,338-45. .
, . , , ,
g y
problems of working parents, both black and white. They had

y
no idea about the problem of discipline, for example.21
p p , p . 1
At first the group floundered. It attempted to file a lawsuit and then

n
sent a delegation to Lansing to complain to the legislature. Neither tactic
c
worked. Then the CCBE leaders decided to mount a petition campaign
n
to recall Arthur Johnson, Leonard Kasle, Remus Robinson, and
d
Abraham Zwerdling, the four liberals on the Detroit Board of
Education. Needing 114,000 valid signatures to force a recall vote, the
petition drive secured the first 35,000 signatures in only five days. On 15
5
June 1970 the CCBE filed petitions with 130,000 signatures. Impressed
by this support, the Michigan legislature passed Public Act 48 in [uly,
nullifying the 7 April school board plan to reassign students. In the
e
August election, more than 60 percent of those voting chose to recall the
22 e
four school board members. This recall campaign, the only successful
one in the history of the Detroit school district, was arguably the high
h
point of mobilization in the rearguard battle against residential
integration fought by Detroit’s white neighborhoods. The CCBE relied
on long-established networks of white homeowners who had resisted
d
residential integration. Delegates from some of the white homeowner
neighborhood groups that had formed the core of this resistance sowed
24
on the governing board of the CCBE.23
With the Eberals purged from the school board the NAACP lost its
behind-the-scenes influence on school reform. It now turned to legal
action. O n 18 August 1970 the NAACP filed suit in federal court seeking
to quash section 12 of Public Act 48 (which had nullified the liberal
l
plan). Two weeks after the recall the NAACP’s national legal staff
expanded the lawsuit to ask for full-scale integration of the Detroit
t
school system. Federal District Judge Stephen J . Roth was randomly
y
picked to hear the case, which became known as Bradley v. Milliken.2*
p , y . .
21
Alexander Ritchie, interview by author, tape recording, Southfield, Mich., 12 December
, , ., r
1996; Mirel, Rise and Tall, 340; Grant, “Community Control,” 74.
22
Grant, “Detroit School Case,” 858; Grant, “Community Control,” 72-75; Sugrue,
y , g ,
Origins of the Urban Crisis, 246-49; Mirel, Rise and Fall, 343-44.
g 23
Ritchie, interview. For the depth of white homeowner organization in postwar
g p
Detroit, see Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis.
24
There is an extensive literature on Bradley v. Milliken. The formal citation is Bradley v.
Milliken, 433 F. 2d 945 (6th Cir. 1971); Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974). For the historic
significance of the case, see Gary Orfield, Must We Bus? Segregated Schools and National Policy
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1978). For a more recent appraisal, see Gary
Orfield and Susan E. Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation: The Quiet Reversal of Brown v. Board of
. , g g g .
g w
Judge Roth was bom in a small village in Austria-Hungary and grew up

the son of an autoworker in Flint, Michigan. After graduating from high
h
school, he spent two years working in factories. He liked to say that he
e
came from a blue-collar, Catholic, melting-pot neighborhood with few
manifestations of racism. In Flint he had been a leader in the conservative,
working-class wing of the state Democratic party. He served one term
m
(1948 to 1950) as state attorney general and had the reputation of being a
a
cautious judge. President Kennedy appointed Roth to the federal bench in
n
1962. His previous rulings gave little indication that he would be
sympathetic to the plaintiffs. Roth’s only other trial of note was the Algiers
Motel case in which three Detroit police officers were charged with
murdering three black men in the Algiers Motel on Woodward Avenue
* m
during the 1967 riot. The jury acquitted the officers.25
Judge Roth took his time setting up the hearing of the Detroit
t
school case, letting the NAACP attorneys know that they could not
“expect push-button relief here. . . . I am not going to move hastily.” He
also rejected the plaintiffs’ request to reinstate the 7 April plan, observing
g
that it was merely “integration by numbers” and “forced- feeding,” rather
r
than a considered approach to devising the best possible educational
l
experience for all the affected students. The NAACP appealed Roth’s
s
ruling to the Sixth District Appellate Court in Cincinnati, which
overruled Judge Roth. But rather than reinstate the 7 April plan, Judge
Roth directed the Detroit school board to prepare a selection of possible
desegregation plans. In December 1970, he chose one of the voluntary
, y
magnet school plans.26
6
This was only a provisional solution to the problem, however, and
d
the trial on the lawsuit to desegregate the entire Detroit school system
began in Judge Roth’s courtroom on 6 April 1971. The first two months
g g p .
Education (New York: The New Press, 1996). The trial transcripts of Bradley v. Milliken contain
much valuable information on the Detroit school system and on residency and race in
Detroit. They are in twenty-seven volumes at the Wayne State University Law School library.
For the Detroit school system, see Jeffrey Mirel’s excellent study, The Rise and Fall of an Urban
n
School System. For the political background to the lawsuit, see Grant, “Detroit School Case.”
For a narrative of the lawsuit by one of the NAACP attorneys, see Paul R. Dimond, Beyond
Busing: Inside the Challenge to Urban Segregation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985).
Eleanor P. Wolf, Trial and Error The Detroit School Segregation Case (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1981) criticizes the methodology and conclusions of the sociology
gy y
undergirding the plaintiffs’ case.
25
Grant, “Detroit School Case,” 858; Dimond, Byond Busing, 31; Macomb Daily, 25
, , , y g, ,
April 1972.
p 26
Roth quotations in Grant, “Detroit School Case,” 859-63; Dimond, Byond Busing,36.
o quo a ons n , , , y g, .
g y
of testimony were devoted to describing residential segregation in

Detroit. The NAACP attorneys presented what they believed to be their
best-supported case to date on the relationship between residential and
school segregation. Real estate agents described the industry’s racially
restrictive practices. They pointed to the fact that in the 1930s even the
e
federal government encouraged housing segregation. The guidelines of
the Home Owner Loan Corporation favored restrictive covenants and
the custom of steering prospective homebuyers on the basis of race.
A giant map illustrating the process of racial succession in
n
neighborhoods dominated the courtroom. And this map eventually
seemed to weigh on the participants’ minds. Alexander Ritchie recalls a
a
speech he delivered three weeks into the trial, concerning the map: “The
e
map itself . . . showed . . . what the NAACP called ‘the invasion tracts.’ It
showed that, as the blacks moved in, the whites moved out. . . . I made aa
speech on that map. . . . I said, This map tells us that the middle class in
Detroit has moved to Warren, to Southfield, to Birmingham, to Bloomfield
Hills, and the people who are left are the people who work at Chrysler,
Ford, and General Motors. . . . The professional class is gone. That’s
.... p g . s
what that map tells me!”’27
7
As William Grant, the Detroit Free Press reporter assigned to the case,
,
later wrote, “It was one of the trial’s most dramatic moments, and from
that point, Mr. Ritchie seized every opportunity to press a demand for a
a
metropolitan remedy.” Ritchie claims to have undergone a genuine
e
conversion and come to the conclusion that working-class blacks and
d
whites in the city were being pitted against each other by a professional
class that had already deserted the city. Ritchie saw that if the city’s
school system became totally black the young white families would leave
e
and the city would lose more tax revenue, fall into disrepair, fail to
28 p , o
deliver services, and finally become unlivable.
8
He knew how to convince the white parents in the CCBE to discard
the fading hope of neighborhood schools in favor of the demand for
g
cross-district busing:
g:
I had a special meeting with the CCBE, and I told them, “This case
e
is going down the tubes! You can’t win. Judge Roth is bound by the
g g . u ge o s oun y e
27
Ritchie, interview.
28
Grant believed that Judge Roth experienced the same revelation, and Ritchie thought
so too. It was possible to win Roth to an appreciation of the plight of both black and white
students in the city because, in Ritchie’s words, “Roth came out of the same working-class
g ss
background as me.” Grant, “Detroit School Case,” 863, 863 n. 52; Ritchie, interview
g . , , , . , .
M g w
testimony. He’s an honest judge. . . . [The plaintiffs] have at least one

glaring example of segregation [in the Detroit public school system].
The proofs are there!” . . . They said, “What should we do?” So I
I
said, ‘Well, think about it. Your kids are going to go to school, and
d
they’re going to be bused, whether you like it or not. . . . Now do
o
you want your kids to go to school where they’re the minority in a
basically black school system, or do you want them to go to school
l
where you’re still the majority?” They said, ‘We’ll be in the majority,
w y,
why not?” I said, “OK. I’ll do my best to bring the suburbs in.”29
w y , . y g n.
Ritchie was in an enviable position. He not only had a mandate from

the white parents of the CCBE to argue for cross-district busing, but also
o
he felt certain that he had established a rapport with Judge Roth, in part
t
because the judge was concerned that restricting the busing plan to
o
Detroit would exacerbate white flight to the suburbs. Ritchie was
convinced— correcdy as it turned out— that the judge would let him
argue for cross -dis trict busing. He fashioned his argument out of the
psychological theory that the NAACP was presenting regarding the
e
relationship between racial self-image and student achievement. The
e
essence of this theory was that students in all-black schools did poorly
because the students and parents, as well as the school administrators
and staff, generally believed that in the absence of white schoolmates
black children would perform poorly in school. The NAACP used
evidence to this effect to argue for busing for racial balance inside the
Detroit district boundaries. All Ritchie had to do was draw this testimony
out in cross-examination and then make the point that, within a few
w
years if not already, there would simply not be enough white students in
n
the city’s schools to leaven the black students’ educational experience.
For this reason, he concluded, the only realistic solution was cross-
s
district busing with the suburban school districts.30
0
As white parents with students in the Detroit school system, Ritchie
and his clients in the CCBE were able to leverage their influence over the
e
outcome of the lawsuit. Ritchie claimed to have accepted the inevitability
and even the necessity of cross-district busing as the best way to
minimize educational risk to the children and the only way to keep young
g
whites from deserting the city, but CCBE members had more practical
goals. They simply wanted to preserve members’ control over their
. p r
29
Ritchie,,interview..
30 Ibid..
g y
children’s education. And if their children were to be bused, the CCBE

wanted the pool of young bus riders to be as white as possible.
Accordingly, the CCBE announced that, as a last resort, it would demand
cross-district busing in order to forestall busing inside Detroit.31
On 15 July 1971, Ritchie asked the judge to include the suburban
n
school systems in the remedy, should he rule that Detroit’s school
system was guilty of de jure segregation. Two months later, on 27
September 1971, Judge Roth announced his finding: the Detroit school
system was indeed segregated de jure as a result of the “action and
inaction” of federal, state, and local governments. That left only the
question of the scope of the remedy. Everyone knew that it was going to
o
involve busing children. Was the judge going to confine busing to the
city or was he going to include the suburbs? On 4 October 1971 Judge
Roth gave the Detroit School Board sixty days to bring him a set of
f
integration plans limited to the city. These plans would include maps of
the paired schools where black and white students would be exchanged
by bus. The judge then gave the State Board of Education four months
to come up with a similar set of plans to blend the student populations
s
of Detroit and its suburbs on a unitary, metropolitan-wide basis.32
The people of Warren responded to these developments with intense
e
interest and anxiety. Two points in the trial produced peaks of activism in
n
Warren. One was Judge Roth’s finding on 27 September 1971 that the
. g g p
31
The president of CCBE, Aubrey Short, warned, “We are not not trying to force
e
busing on [suburban] schools, but if the court says busing must be the rule in Detroit,
then as part of that solution we will . . . consider asking the court to include metro-wide
e
busing. . . .” At the same time he coyly invited the suburbs to join the coalition against
busing. “If they want to help the fight against cross-boundary busing . . . [the suburbs]
should be backing our efforts.” He went on to characterize his group as firmly opposed
to liberal plans for integration. “If the suburbs want to help us fight the NAACP busing
g
plan . . . they can help with support, not by lulling the people to think we are a bunch of
f
liberals . . . which we are not by any point of imagination[sic].” Macomb Daily,13 July 1971.
To the consternation of parents in Warren, Short took the occasion to reach out in an n
ironic gesture of racial solidarity to the whites who had already fled the city: “Maybe now
w
the suburbs will take heed of our dilemma in Detroit and support our fight against the
NAACP suit.” Macomb Daily, 16 July 1971. Again, when the CCBE announced its
intention to press for metropolitan-wide busing in the event that the judge ruled that the
e
Detroit school system was intentionally segregated, Aubrey Short appealed to suburban
n
voters to join the antibusing movement: “We also believe a child should attend the school
nearest to his home, and I think that’s what the people in the suburbs want . . . so if they
... y
want to help, they should be backing our effort.” Macomb Daily,13 July 1971.
32
Detroit Public Schools Community Relations Papers, folders 7-9, box 7, ALUA;
, , , ;
Macomb Daily,16 July 1971.
y, y .
g w
Detroit school system was segregated de jure. The second came nine
months later on 14 June 1972 when the judge ordered the two-way busing
g
of 780,000 students in Detroit and fifty-two suburban school districts,
including all of Warren. A third important date, which brought closure and
relief to the citizens of Warren, was the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling two
g o
years later, on 25 July 1974, striking down Judge Roth’s busing order.
y
Already in the spring and summer of 1971 observers in Warren were
e
following the desegregation trial in Detroit with increasing concern and
d
disbelief. “It will take an army to enforce that kind of a ruling if the court
was foolish enough to try and force integration on suburban school
l
districts,” one citizen told the Macomb Daily. A suburban attorney
y
predicted, “Any day now, the motion to include the 87 districts [it turned
d
out to be 52 suburban districts] will be entertained— in what could
become this nation’s most historic school desegregation battle.”33
Among the first to consider the changes that cross-district busing
would bring to Warren was Mitch Kehetian, the head of the Macomb
Daily’s Warren desk. Kehetian deplored busing, and he became an
important voice in the antibusing movement. Although it would
overstate the case to say that the Macomb Daily created the antibusing
movement in Macomb County, the paper clearly lined up editorially on
the antibusing side of the struggle. It kept the topic in front of the news
stories when there were no new developments to report. It created a
special busing section in the letters to the editor. It also took care to
. o
announce upcoming antibusing rallies.34
ann 4
Just as the editors of the Macomb Daily used the busing issue to sell
papers, Warren’s local politicians used the busing issue to enhance their
careers. It offered an opportunity for generalized us-versus-them
electioneering. The busing panic hit Warren during its 1971 mayoral
l
campaign and became a major issue in the contest between the
p g e
33
Richard Sabaugh, interview by author, tape recording, Mt. Clemens, Mich., 1 3
, . , ., 3
February 1997; Macomb Daily, 13, 14, 16 July 1971.
34
Macomb Daily, 4 October 1971. The liberal Northeast Interfaith Center for Racial
Justice investigated the Macomb Daily’s coverage of the busing issue. The study concluded
that “the Macomb Daily has lost its objectivity” and that the result of the paper’s coverage
e
would be “a continuation of the antibusing hysteria. . . . We think the end result will be
violence. . . . The Macomb Daily is yelling ‘fire’ to a large audience and when these frightened
people begin to react, then those who used this fear to sell newspapers and/ or build political
cal
careers will share responsibility for their acts.” Sally Chalgian, interview by author, tape
recording, Warren, Mich., 10 November 1995; “The Message Is Violence: A Case Study of
the Macomb Daily September 1971 June 1972,” unpublished paper prepared by the Northeast
Interfaith Center for Racial Justice Media Task Force (copy in author’s possession).
n er a py p .
g y
incumbent, Ted Bates, and challenger Richard Sabaugh. Bates was a

Democrat who had learned to bend with the political winds. City
Councilman Sabaugh (Carmella Sabaugh’s husband) also identified
d
nominally with the Democratic party and had been active in his union
when he worked as a teacher in Detroit, but his political tendencies were
growing increasingly conservative. Earlier in 1970 he had led the
successful struggle against HUD’s open housing campaign in Warren. 35
5
During the election Sabaugh brought a resolution before the city
y
council deploring “the concept of busing to foster so-called racial
l
balance.” His colleagues tabled the motion and criticized him for
exaggerating the busing threat to boost his mayoral campaign. But they
also fell in line with Sabaugh’s opposition to busing. Mayor Bates
covered himself by publicly denouncing busing as “an infringement on
the will of the people.” He called for a constitutional amendment
banning busing, but at the same time he slammed Sabaugh for using the
busing issue for political gain. Bates won the election, but Sabaugh had
, g
sounded the alarm against busing. 36
6
Busing became the paramount issue of Warren politics in the early
1970s. As one observer put it, “Busing was a huge horse that many people
e
rode.”37 The issue literally made the political careers of some people in
Warren. One example is George E. Montgomery. A Warren resident with a
a
small law practice, Montgomery ran for a seat on the city council in 1970,
but he put little time and money into the campaign and did poorly. In 1971
he ran again in the primary. He knew of Richard Sabaugh’s attempt to get
t
the city council to pass a resolution against busing. Concerned that his own
children might be bused to school in Detroit, Montgomery made his
s
opposition to busing a part of his campaign. He did much better this time,
placing tenth even though his campaign was financed on a shoestring and
g d
he depended on his own family to distribute his fliers door to door.
Montgomery’s showing in the primary had been good enough to get
t
him into the general election for city council. He decided to concentrate on
the busing issue by starting a petition drive against busing. He picked up
p
his petitions from the printer on 27 September 1971, the same day that
Judge Roth announced his finding that the Detroit school system was
g g y
35
Riddle, “HUD and the Open Housing Controversy.”
36 "
Quotations from Macomb Daily,14, 21 July 1971; Richard Sabaugh, interview; Sinclair,
,
interview. Mayor Bates’s counterattack on Councilman Sabaugh is in “A Message to the
e
Citizens of Warren from the Mayor,” in John Cardinal Dearden Papers (uncatalogued,
g ,
hereafter Dearden Papers), Archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit, Detroit, Michigan
37 , , g
Donald Binkowski to David Riddle,, 6 December 1996..
g w
Busing protest meeting at Fitzgerald High School, 27 September 1971

*a&
1.4 V
l&v*;
of the Macomb Daily
I
courtesy
Photo
g y
segregated. This increased the likelihood that the judge would order cross-
s
district busing. Montgomery’s petitions hit the street in the midst of the
e
furor. That night, he handed them out at an impromptu antibusing rally at
Fitzgerald High School, on the city’s south side. He volunteered his law
office as the drop-off point for completed petitions. A local media
personality, Lou Gordon, invited Montgomery to appear on his television
show, and a roving NBC News crew in Cleveland picked up the story and
gave it national coverage. George Montgomery thus went from an
n
anonymous city council candidate to a national spokesman against busing
at the very moment that the issue exploded in Warren. He placed fourth in
the council race and went on to become a circuit court judge.38
The political strength of antibusing sentiment was confirmed in the
1972 primary election, which included a county advisory referendum on
busing. Confirming the growing unpopularity of busing, the referendum
m
was worded, “Do you approve of the busing of students across school
l
district lines?” Warren’s precinct tallies on the measure ranged between
n
82 percent and 99 percent negative. With these numbers, it is no wonder
r
that the issue imposed certain restrictions on politicians. Virtually no
local political leader came out openly in support of busing in Warren.
For, if “busing was a huge horse that many people rode,” it was equally
yp p , q y
capable of bucking the rider.39
p g . 9
38
On 17 October 1971 Montgomery presented his antibusing petitions with more
than fifty-two thousand signatures to Congressman O’Hara. George E. Montgomery,
interview by author, tape recording, Warren, Mich., 25 January 1997; Macomb Daily,17, 18
October 1971. George Montgomery was not the only politician to fashion a political
career out of the busing issue. Although Lillian Klimecki Dannis was already a forceful
personality on the city council, she consolidated her reputation as a no-nonsense defender
r
of Warren’s families with her work on the busing issue. She and four other women
founded one of Warren’s antibusing groups, Warren Residents Acting Positively (WRAP).
The group, formed in July 1972, grew out of a year of antibusing activism by its
s
organizers. WRAP made a solemn pledge never to become a sounding board for any
politician, but Dannis, as an organizer, was an exception. Her political standing in Warren
n
went up because of the community outreach that WRAP did on the busing issue. Dannis
went on to serve as city treasurer of Warren. Geri Suma, telephone interview by author,
,
tape recording, 11 March 1997; Macomb Daily,18 July 1972.
p 39
Returns on the busing advisory in the 1972 Canvassed Records, Macomb County
Clerk’s Office, Mt. Clemens, Michigan. Joseph M Snyder, a Democratic state
representative from St. Clair Shores, was an exception to this rule in his unruffled
pronouncements on the issue. See correspondence between Snyder and John Cardinal
Dearden, in Dearden Papers. Some local politicians were able to duck the issue. Former
City Councilman Donald Binkowski refused to answer questions on the subject of busing
when he ran for circuit judge. Donald Binkowski, interview by author, tape recording,
, y , p g,
Detroit, Mich., 2 January 1997.
, ., .
g
The issue also had an impact on mainstream political institutions like

the Community Action Program (CAP), the political voice of the United
d
Automobile Workers (UAW). Douglas Fraser, who was the head of
Michigan CAP at the time, had to answer phone calls from union members
in Warren who were angry about the union’s support of busing:
n arren w o were ang y pp g
We’d get an awful lot of irate phone calls from our membership
in Warren. And you had to listen to them, and they were so
o
emotional! The story that was most repeated was, “I lived in
n
Detroit. I came out to the suburbs for good schools. I paid my
y
taxes. . . .” They might have accepted one-way busing of black
kids from Detroit. “But taking my kids from my neighborhood
d
school that I fought so hard to get and why I built a house out
here, taking them and moving them back to all the dangers in
g
Detroit. . .. ..” Well,, you could understand the emotion.. 411
..
Sometimes antibusing zealots targeted one individual. The main

n
focus of hatred was, of course, Judge Roth. Bumper stickers soon
n
appeared in Macomb County proclaiming: “Roth is a four-letter word,”
“Judge Roth is a child-molester,” and “Pith on Roth.” In Wyandotte, a
downriver Detroit suburb, the local antibusing group hung Judge Roth in
n
effigy in July 1972, after Pontiac antibusing leader Irene McCabe found
d
him guilty of destroying neighborhood schools. His coffin, labeled,
,
“Here Go the Judge,” was then thrown in the river to “float back to
o
Detroit where it belongs,” according to the rally leader. Judge Roth was
shielded from the political aspect of this backlash because as a federal
district judge he was appointed for life, a fact that probably made him all
l
the more unpopular. Telephone harassment of the judge continued to
o
the day of his death from heart disease in 1974. Alexander Ritchie, the
CCBE lawyer who had argued for expanding the busing order to include
the suburbs, also came in for harassment. At the height of the busing
40 g
panic, he received several telephone threats on his life.41
pan 1
The fear of busing withered everything it touched. Because cross-
s
district busing was by definition a metropolitan regional program, a
a
cloud of suspicion hung over other joint city-suburban programs. Even
co p g y .
40
Irving Bluestone and Douglas Fraser, interview by author, tape recording, Detroit,
one an oug as raser, y , p g, ,
Mich., 3 April 1997.
41
Grant, “Detroit School Case,” 865-66. O n the Roth “hanging,” Macomb Daily, 31
1
July 1972; Ritchie, interview..
y ,
g on roversy
sharing water-purification or sewage- treatment systems was seen as a

conspiracy against home rule. Thus, the antiregionalist movement
fostered a kind of Jim Crow system of “separate but equal”
infrastructures for the suburbs and the city. In October 1971 Save Our
Children (SOC), Warren’s first antibusing group, accused six candidates
in upcoming local elections of being soft on “local control of our schools
and local government.” The press release cited the League of Women
n
Voters’ guide, where the six candidates all had initially stated that they
“would vote to join SEMCOG [Southeastern Michigan Council of
f
Governments] and cooperate in their Regional Programs!” When thus
s
confronted, the candidates protested that SEMCOG did not support
t
busing and that, in any event, they all opposed busing. (The remaining
three local candidates had already reversed their initial support for
SEMCOG and were now running for election on a platform that
included opposition not only to busing but also to SEMCOG.) Fear of
f
regionalism was becoming a feature of Macomb County politics because
ure o acom oun y po cs ecause
of the area’s fears about busing.42
2
The busing crisis also gave new life to the right-wing group
- p
Breakthrough. In early December 1971 the group got permission to hold
d
a rally in the auditorium of Warren Woods High School. Donald
d
Lobsinger, Breakthrough’s founder, spoke for three hours to an audience
e
of 250 supporters. Short, trim, energetic, and as likely to resort to his
s
fists as to engage in political debate, Lobsinger declared that busing was
g g p , nger ec are a us ng was
42
“SOC Fights SEMCOG, Bulletin #4— October 29, 1971,” in Dearden Papers,
Macomb Daily,1, 2 November 1971. A semipublic authority, SEMCOG was formed by
state act in 1967 to share resources and spur regional economic development It
conducted studies on regionally coordinated transportation, water, and sewage-treatment
projects. It also processed federal HUD and block grant fund requests. Macomb County
joined SEMCOG in 1970 and then pulled out again in early 1972. Macomb County didy
not rejoin SEMCOG until 1986. Sec boxes 38, 39, 42, SEMCOG Papers, Part 2, AEUA.
This fear of regionalism resonated strongly with George Wallace supporters. The 1974
4
Macomb County convention of Wallace’s American Independent Party (AIP) even
featured “Metropolitanism” as its main theme. A leaflet circulated among the Macomb
County Wallace supporters denounced “METRO-GOVERNMENT” as a nefarious b
conspiracy. Strangely, it was a conspiracy with a mailing address. According to the AIP
convention program, “METRO-GOVERNMENT . . . IS A GROUP of national and
international organizations located at 1313 East 60th Street, Chicago, Illinois.” This group
p
was guided by an “INTERNATIONALIST PLAN FOR COMPLETE WORLD
DOMINATION.” AIP was an extreme example, but “running against regionalism” was D
becoming part of the political culture in Warren, just like “running against Detroit.” See
e
“American Independent Party of Macomb County Convention—-June 8, 1974,” in
onven on une , , n
Macomb County 1974 folder, box 38, SEMCOG Papers.
, , apers.
g w
part of a larger communist-directed effort to sap the nation’s strength.

The “trouble in our schools and in our core cities is the sinister work of
white and black communists,” he declared. In Lobsinger’s view, ,
integration and communism were much the same thing. “If they’re
e
successful in forcing school integration through forced busing, next
t
they’ll send your kids to special Marxist- communist learning schools.”
The Macomb Daily reporter sent to cover the event remarked on the
e
prickly feeling that came over him as the response, “Hang them,” echoed
p , g ,
throughout the auditorium.43
3
Another influence on Warren’s antibusing movement was the
ongoing antibusing struggle in nearby Pontiac, Michigan. Pontiac was a
union town with many black and Appalachian white autoworkers. Its
schools were clearly segregated by race. Since 1948 the Pontiac School
Board had redrawn attendance boundaries six times in order to maintain
racial separation in its schools. This made it easy for the local NAACP to
o
charge the board with de jure segregation. The case, Davis v. School District
of the City of Pontiac, was assigned to Damon Keith, an African-American
federal district judge. In 1969 Keith found that the Pontiac School Board
was guilty of de jure segregation and ordered the busing of about eight
thousand of the school district’s twenty-four thousand students to begin
at the start of the 1971 school year. White parents formed a resistance
group, the National Action Group (NAG). After the school board lost
its appeal of Keith’s order, NAG sponsored a rally attended by five
thousand people featuring NAG leader Irene McCabe and Alabama
g
Governor George Wallace.
Pontiac was in a state of near rebellion the week before the busing plan
was to go into effect. On 30 August 1971 ten of the school district’s buses
s
were blown up in a nighttime attack. Acting on an informer’s tip, the
Pontiac police soon arrested six members of the local Ku Klux Klan,
,
including Michigan Klan leader Robert Miles. On 7 September six women
padlocked themselves to a fence surrounding the school bus parking lot. A
A
week later five hundred pickets blocked three gates at the Pontiac General
p g l
43
Macomb Daily, 1 December 1971. A Korean War veteran, Lobsinger worked as a
a
clerk for the city of Detroit. He was a tireless organizer of racist and anticommunist
t
demonstrations from the 1960s well into the 1990s. His roots were on Detroit’s east side,
a neighborhood with a history of right-wing activism that stretched back at least to the
e
1940s. Lobsinger grafted his own conservative Catholicism onto the anticommunism of
f
the John Birch Society. By the late 1960s he had organized Breakthrough, a consciously
right-wing group that attacked antiwar and civil rights demonstrations as well as liberal
p g l
Catholic priests.
.
g y
Motors Fisher Body plant to protest busing. UAW officials, including

g
Irving Bluestone, the director of the GM Department of the union, tried
, d
unsuccessfully to get workers to cross the picket lines.44
The events in Pontiac unfolded at the same time that parents in n
Warren were awaiting Judge Roth’s finding regarding de jure segregation
of the Detroit school district. Given the already announced intention of
f
white Detroit parents in the CCBE to urge Judge Roth to order cross-
district busing in the event of such a finding, the example of Pontiac
heightened fears in Warren. One Warren housewife whose parents were
e
both UAW members and who, at her father’s urging, had canvassed
d
neighborhoods in support of liberal Senator Philip Hart, recalled the
e
widespread suspicion that busing was being tried out in Pontiac in order
r
to impose it on other suburbs. “Not that I’m conspiratorial or anything,
but it seemed like it was going to go into other suburbs as well. . . . The
first thing we thought of was, ‘They’re going to bust up the schools!
What about the after-school programs these kids have? How are they
going to play baseball, how are they going to attend catechism class if
yg g
they’re riding a bus?”’45
y
The example of Pontiac also impressed Warren’s antibusing activists
s
with the need both to avoid violence and to keep the movement our of
the hands of radicals. Although many people in Warren admired Irene
McCabe for her determination, most dissociated themselves from the e
violence that occurred in Pontiac— in particular, the school bus
bombing. One antibusing activist stated, “The one thing that we told
d
people was that we do not advocate violence. We believe in doing things
through the democratic process.” She noted that radical elements
frequently attached themselves to social movements. “The five of us [the
e
founding members of WRAP— Warren Residents Acting Positively]
knew who we were and we knew what we were.. You let some radical .. .. ..
get in there and they can destroy your entire organization.”46
g y yy g .
44
“They were massing outside of the gates, to keep the people from going in,”
recalls Bluestone. “What we did . . . was to order them to go to work on the basis that
they were in violation of the contract, in violation of the UAW constitution, in violation
of the law and, in any event, that the UAW was supportive of busing. . . . We got a lot of
f
‘Boos.’” Less than half of the 650-man shift went in to work, and management closed the
plant for the day. See Macomb Daily,31 August, 7, 9, 11 September 1971; Bluestone and
y. y, g , , , p
Fraser,, interview..
45
Suma,, interview..
46
Ibid..
g w
One significant feature of the antibusing movement in Warren was

s
that women led it. Men played different roles in the movement— they
formulated language on the petitions and spoke in the large meetings.
Women did most of the unglamorous and indispensable work of
f
maintaining phone trees, going door to door, gathering signatures on
n
petitions, collecting pledges not to allow children to be bused, and
soliciting the dollar donation with each pledge. But women also served as
the visible leadership of the antibusing movement. Male politicians
suggested that this was a natural part of women’s role in caring for
r
children: “With women . . . the cross-district busing thing impacted on
47 g g p n
their concern for education for their children.”
.
Warren’s busing panic began on 27 September 1971, as the news
spread that Judge Roth had issued a finding of de jure segregation in the
e
Detroit school system. Shordy after the judge’s ruling, a rally in
Fitzgerald High School attracted one thousand angry parents. Philip Lee,
the leader of Save Our Children (SOC), took the podium and charged,
“The legislators don’t have the backbone to stand up and be counted. . . .
They are trying to shove off their ill deeds on the white community and
force us to accept what we don’t want. Let’s face it— we’re getting
government of the minority against the majority. It’s time to wake up.”
gover y g y. p.
47
Suma, interview; quotation from Richard Sabaugh, interview; Ralph Liberate,
telephone interview by author, 1 April 1997. The prominence of women in Warren’s
antibusing movement held true in other antibusing movements of the late 1960s and early
1970s as well. Irene McCabe headed NAG (National Action Group) in Pontiac. In
Boston, Louise Day Hicks and Pixie Palladino headed ROAR (Restore Our Alienated
Rights). In Warren some groups had male leaders, but the five founding members of
WRAP were all women (as was typical), and only one of them had a career outside of the
home. Community acceptance of women as leaders of the antibusing protest movement
has been remarked on in studies of other cities, as has the fact that the antibusing crusade
seemed to empower these women. Ronald Formisano argues that in Boston the
antibusing movement provided conservative women with a traditional but activist vision
of their role in society during the early 1970s, when the women’s liberation movement
influenced many women. Lillian Rubin’s work on the antibusing controversy in the
working-class community of Richmond, California, notes that the traditional values of the
e
antibusing women did not impede their leadership. They were secure in their roles as
housewives and yet willing to go to “heroic” lengths to protect their children. Ronald
Formisano, Boston Against Busing: Race,Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 146-50; Lillian B. Rubin, Busing and
d
Backlash:White Against White in a California School District (Berkeley: University of California
ns e n a a orn a y y a
Press, 1972), 60-61.
, , .
g y
Lee claimed the credit when twenty thousand students boycotted Warren
y y n
schools three days later.48
The following night more angry speeches filled the air in a meeting
g
at Carter Junior High School in Warren. A reporter for the Macomb Daily
y
was struck by the fact that “some of the loudest cheers from the
e
audience were for racially tinged remarks.” County Commissioner Robert
t
Verkulen, for one, took up the “minority” theme: “This country is
supposed to be based on majority rule, but a minority of ten percent is
dictating to us, the majority. We are being discriminated against.” O n the
e
other hand, the moderate Warren City Councilman Floyd Underwood
got a round of applause when he urged, “If there’s enough money to bus
kids, then I say we put that money into the deprived areas to bring about
g t
equality. Give them new buildings and good teachers.”49
q 9
In the confusion that prevailed during the busing panic, some
e
groups tried to mobilize support by spreading rumors by telephone.
.
Signs were posted in public places claiming that busing was already under
way, although Judge Roth had not ruled on the remedy in the lawsuit.
Trying to calm the alarm even as he ran to keep in front of the issue,
Mayor Bates set up a rumor-control center and urged calm, as did the
editors of the Macomb Daily. O n 2 October Mayor Bates and four
members of the city council left for Washington, D.C., to deliver
postcards and antibusing petitions with more than forty thousand
signatures to their congressman, James O’Hara. The delegation also tried
to confer with Louise Day Hicks, formerly a leader of the antibusing
movement in Boston. Representative Hicks had introduced a bill in the
House six months earlier (the “Nondiscriminatory Education Act”)
prohibiting “the forcing of a child to leave his neighborhood school to
attend another more distant school because of his race,, color,, creed, ,
religion, or national origin.” 50
0
The flames of hysteria were fanned by a headline in the Macomb Daily
y
of 5 October to the effect that Judge Roth had ordered a “Metro
Integration Plan . . . To Include All-White-Suburban Districts. . . .” Only
in its conclusion did the story state that Judge Roth had not, in fact,
ordered a metro district plan. Nor had he even suggested that metrowide
e
busing would be his ruling. What he had done was to order the Detroit
School Board and the State Board of Education to submit alternativee
48
Macomb Daily, 28 September, 1971.
49
Macomb Daily, 28, 30 September, 2 October 1971.
50
Macomb Daily, 28, 30 September, 3 October 1971.
y, , p , .
g w
at Lois E. Carter Junior High School, 1 October 1971

v..<~*iC A
il >
Wr-?
Busing protest meeting
*-* V?
of the Macomb Daily
?S***:
courtesy
Photo
g y
plans for districtwide and for cross-district busing. Still, the news story
y
heightened the antibusing furor. Ad hoc groups held impromptu rallies
s
in high school auditoriums and on the campus of Macomb Community
51 p y
College throughout October.
1
During this confusing period some antibusing groups lasted only a
short time. Some changed names or merged with other groups. The
e
Silent Majority was the name of a group that appeared shordy after the
Fitzgerald High School rally, only to join Save Our Children (SOC) a day
later. Another short-lived Warren group, Residents Opposing Busing
g
(ROB), favored working through Congress and the courts to oppose
busing, rather than resorting to violence or boycotting schools. In March
yet another group, the Warren branch of the National Action Group
p
(Warren-NAG), joined the crowded field of antibusing organizations.
Some groups came on the scene later, during the second infusion of
f
energy into the antibusing movement when Judge Roth ordered cross-
district busing in the summer of 1972. Warren Residents Acting
Positively (WRAP) and Kids Attend Their Schools (KATS) both date
e
from July 1972. In spite of the potential for rivalry, most of the groups
s
agreed in principle to maintain unity. “We were all involved in this
52
lawsuit and we all had the same objective,” remembers one activist.
2
This mobilization against busing received the blessing of local school
officials. In early October the superintendent of schools in neighboring
g
Roseville announced, “I will take any legal steps that can be taken. . . .
I’m against busing students out of Roseville.” The Fraser school district
t
board of education sent parents a letter declaring that it “never has and is
s
not now planning to bus students out of the district.” The president of
f
the school board for the Warren consolidated district promised the
board’s commitment to “a community school concept,” adding that “we
would pursue this . . . through the legal means available.” The director of
community relations for the Fitzgerald school district reiterated the
district’s “commit[ment] to the neighborhood school concept.” The
g p . e
51
Macomb Daily,6 October 1971.
52
In an effort to coordinate the legal strategy of the suburban antibusing movement,
a new group, Tri-County Citizens, came together in early December 1971. Led by three
Macomb County lawyers, this group took on the task of critiquing the constitutional
reasoning behind the expected cross-district busing order. O n 15 March 1972, prior to
o
hearing arguments on the districtwide and cross-district busing plans, Judge Roth allowed
d
Tri-County Citizens to join the newly created group of suburban interveners in the case.
Macomb Daily,30 September, 5, 6 October 1971; 16 March, 18 July 1972; quotation from
, , , y q
Suma,, interview. .
g
pronouncements of these educational leaders helped to legitimize the

e
antibusing movement.53
3
It took three years for Bradley v. Milliken to work its way through the
courts. During this period antibusing agitation rose occasionally to a a
crisis but was more often a chronic condition. Although the issue
continued to dominate Macomb County politics through the fall of 1971,
speakers at rallies began to notice a falloff in attendance by mid-October.
.
This may have reflected the local officials’ desire to regain control of
f
things and to direct the protests into legislative channels or toward
amending the Constitution to prohibit busing. Also, the negative
consequences of violent protest were demonstrated when five members
of the Ku Klux Klan were indicted in the Pontiac school bus bombing
g
case on 19 October.54 Even school boycotts lost their appeal. One called
by Macomb County-NAG in late October failed. Thus, the panic phase
of the antibusing movement lasted less than a month. Once the panic ran
its course, a portion of the antibusing movement settled down to long-
on o g g
haul organizing.55
5
Warren Residents Acting Positively (WRAP) discovered that it had
d
to delegate chores to as many people as possible. It was too hard to have
e
people calling the main organizers’ houses at all hours of the day and
d
night. The leaders of WRAP came up with an area chairman system,
,
which divided Warren into its different neighborhoods. Fundraising for
r
lawyers’ fees took the form of door-to-door pledge drives of a dollar per
r
family. Educational meetings were held occasionally. They kept
t
supporters up-to-date on the progress of the lawsuit or enabled outside
speakers, like Irene McCabe of Pontiac’s National Action Group, to
o
describe other antibusing struggles. At every critical point in the legal
p g
process the organizers were able to call mass rallies.56
6
Sometimes these meetings took on the aspect of high theater. O n
n
the evening of 19 October 1971, the Macomb County antibusing
g
forces held a fact-finding meeting at Sterling Heights High School to
listen to their archnemesis, Alexander Ritchie, discuss the busing
case. Ritchie, the attorney for the Detroit white parents’ group, the
e
Citizens’ Committee for Better Education, began his remarks by
zens o , g y
53
54
“A sixth Klansman, Edmund Reimer of Howell, was arrested at the same time in
September, but he was not indicted by the grand jury. An intensive investigation indicated
d
Reimer was not involved in the alleged conspiracies.” Macomb Daily, 21 October 1971.
e m 55 . , .
Macomb Daily,16, 26, 28, 29 October 1971.
56 , , , .
Suma,, interview..
g y
noting, with a disarming lack of modesty, “You are here tonight

because of the action I have taken. . . .” (Ritchie was referring to the
plea he had made to Judge Roth to expand the busing plan to include
the suburbs.) “But I think you realize you wouldn’t be in opposition
n
if you lived o n the other side of Eight Mile Road.” To a completely
y
silent crowd, Ritchie described the expert testimony of psychologists
and sociologists called by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit: “ I t is the
opinion of these experts that a black child cannot be properly
motivated in a predominately black school. . . . Every school district
t
must have blacks but maintain a substantial white majority.” The
conclusion was simple: “Since 65 per cent of Detroit’s 287,000
0
students are black, there can be n o real integration without including
the suburbs.”. Ritchie remembers the reaction after he finished d
speaking:
p g
I held that audience for forty- five minutes in total silence, and
when I finished . . . the place exploded. Brooks Patterson [the
e
Pontiac-NAG lawyer who later became Oakland County
y
Prosecutor] grabbed me by the arm and said, “Oh, my God,
,
they’re going to kill you!” . . . I had to get a police escort to the
car. . . . I told them, “What makes you think, with buses rolling
all over the South, that you guys are not subject to the
e
Constitution of the United States? . . . We’re either a
government of laws, or we’re nothing.” I said, “Come on, my
, , y
clients are just like you.” But they didn’t like it.57
y . y .
The other speakers, Irene McCabe, Brooks Patterson, and Philip Lee
(chairman of SOC), tried to distance themselves from Ritchie’s reasoning.
.
“Misery likes company, so white Detroiters drag us into it!” protested Lee.
.
Lee said he didn’t believe that a black student would do better in schooll
just because he was sitting next to a white student: “We don’t owe the
blacks a thing and it is time they learned to live together.”58
ac 8
These meetings kept the busing issue in the public eye and infused
new energy into the movement. A more ambitious effort was Irenee
McCabe’s quixotic march to Washington, D.C., in support of an antibusing
constitutional amendment. NAG announced this action in late February
1972. Scheduled to depart Pontiac on 15 March and to rally at the Capitol
. p l
57
Ritchie, interview. .
58
Macomb Daily, 20 October 1971 .
y, .
30 Michigan Historical Ret'ieu'
g
on 23 April, the march immediately received the blessing and support of

Alabama Governor George Wallace. As McCabe’s “Journey for America”
passed through Dearborn Heights, a west-side Detroit suburb, two Warren n
city councilmen briefly joined the march and presented Mrs. McCabe with
h
a transistor radio and the good wishes of “180,000 men, women andd
children living in Warren.” The Macomb Daily kept readers abreast of the
progress of the march and reported on Warren Mayor Ted Bates’s trip to
Ohio to greet “Irene and her brave companions”— now dwindled to a
o a
hard core of four marchers— as they approached Akron.59
ar 9
McCabe’s march provided Warren’s politicians with an opportunity
to take a symbolic stand in support of the antibusing movement.
.
Councilman Howard Austin, when asked why he had brought his young
son to meet Mrs. McCabe as she marched through Dearborn Heights in
mid-March, captured the sentiment of middle-class rebellion that the e
antibusing cause had come to stand for. “They can draft my 18-year-old
d
son to fight for this country, but I’m not going to sit by and let some
federal judge draft my 4-year-old boy into a foolhardy social experiment
- - 60 y p t
someone concocted on middle-class America.” .
O n 13 April 1972, while the McCabe march was still en route, Judge
e
Roth announced that he intended to order cross-district busing.
Although he did not specify which of the metropolitan-wide plans he
e
would choose, tension built rapidly in Warren. The next evening, one
e
thousand people jammed into Warren’s Fitzgerald High School
auditorium for a rally called by Warren-NAG. Speakers from the county
Democratic and Republican parties agreed on the need for unity in
fighting the imminent busing order. Rally organizers called for volunteers
rs
to travel to Washington, D.C., for a welcoming rally for the McCabe
e
march. Those who could not make the trip were invited to join a “mini-
march” in Warren on 23 April. Warren high school students boycotted
classes on 21 April, and four hundred of them picketed the Warren city
y
hall to wish Mayor Bates good luck in his trip to the Washington rally.
Between ten thousand and fifteen thousand people marched in Warren
the following Sunday. When McCabe and her marchers finally arrived in
Washington, D.C., on 29 April, fifteen hundred supporters, most from
Macomb County, were there to greet them, although the turnout
g , g
disappointed the organizers.61
pp g . 1
59
Macomb Daily, 28 February, 17, 27 March, 3 April 1972.
60 , , , p .
Macomb Daily, 3 April 1972.
61
Macomb Daily, 14, 21, 22 April 1972.
aco y, , , p .
31
8I

Radlon
in
South
DETROIT
y
Busing Controversy
g
Map courtesy o f the Detroit News

Judge Stephen J. Roth’s order for cross-district school busing. The map shows how
The Cross-District
suburban school districts were to be “clustered” with Detroit high school
areas carrying corresponding numbers.
g
Less than two months later, on 14 June 1972, Judge Roth issued a
ruling requiring metropolitan-wide racial integration of primary and
secondary schools. He named a panel to develop a final plan for busing
fifty-three of the eighty-three school districts (counting Detroit) within
n
the metropolitan area. The total number of students enrolled in the
e
affected school districts was 780,000, one-third of the public school
l
pupils in the state. Roth also specified the clusters into which the fifty-
three school districts would be grouped. Residents of Warren’s six
x
school districts learned that their elementary and high schools would be
paired with Northeastern, Osborn, Denby, Finney, and Kettering
schools in Detroit. There would be two-way busing (Detroit children to
Warren and Warren children to Detroit). Community leaders expressed
shock and dismay. They issued statements denouncing Judge Roth for
handing down a busing order even though Congress had just passed an
eighteen-month moratorium on busing as part of an education bill. No
busing was imminent, however, for Judge Roth’s order was certainly
headed for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and from there, regardless
pp , g s
of who won, to the Supreme Court.62
2
As the anxiety level fluctuated from its height in the fall of 1971 to
relative calm a few months later and then to renewed intensity as the
judge prepared his busing order in the summer of 1972, a few voices in
n
Warren urged an open mind on the busing issue. The Northeast
t
Interfaith Center for Racial Justice (NEIFCRJ) made the main attempt to
o
organize liberal elements in Macomb County. This church-based group
grew out of the Warren-Centerline Human Relations Council in 1968. A
member of the Interfaith Center recalled that although the busing
g
controversy isolated the liberals, they tried to respond by founding a
group called Peaceful Schools. They charged the Macomb Daily with
irresponsibly stirring up antibusing sentiment. They produced bumper
stickers urging nonviolence in the schools and released statements to thee
press calling for patience and calm.63
p g p . 3
62
Macomb Daily, 9, 15 June 1972; Joe T. Darden et al., Detroit: Race and Uneven
Development (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 228; Dimond, Beyond Busing,80-87.
eve o63
Herbert Lowe, telephone interview by author, 20 May 1997. Founded in 1968,
NEIFCRJ built up a mailing list of 979 names and conducted nine seminar sessions with
h
a combined participation of 278 in 1971. By 1972 the Northeast Interfaith Center had a
a
membership of 95 individuals, six Protestant churches, and five Catholic churches. Sally
Chalgian, interview by author, tape recording, 10 November 1995; membership records of
f
the Northeast Interfaith Center for Racial Justice, 1971, 1972 (copy in author’s
possession). Three of the Protestant churches (but none of the Catholic churches)
possess on .
The Cross-District Busing Controversy
g y
33
Other voices of moderation included some teachers and school

administrators. As one wryly put it, “We were teachers, after all, and used
to seeing school buses.” Early in the controversy, the principal of
f
Pennow Elementary School scolded parents for the distraction that the
school boycotts imposed on the children: “Actions such as this help tear
down the respect for the school and make the job more difficult in doing
what we are supposed to do—educate boys and girls. . . . We now know
w
people’s feeling regarding school busing. O f course, these feelings were
known before the children were kept home from school. We are sure
* .
this is a very slight accomplishment.”64
Such expressions were usually drowned out within Warren by the
uproar over busing. But the two main institutions that had served as the
e
conscience of the working class in southeastern Michigan, the Catholic
Church and the UAW, each tried to take a stand on busing. The most
decisive moral leadership came from the Catholic Archdiocese in
Detroit, led by John Cardinal Dearden. During the outraged reaction to
Judge Roth’s 14 June 1972 busing order, Dearden reminded the priests
in the Diocese of Warren of the Catholic Church’s policy not to
capitalize on the crisis in public education occasioned by the busing
g
controversy in order to boost enrollment in Catholic schools:
:
Parents, who have demonstrated no previous interest in Catholic

education but now seek to enroll their children in a Cathohc c
school, must expect to be questioned carefully regarding their
motivation at this time in seeking a Catholic school education.
Because it is so important to eliminate any possibility that our
schools become— or even seem to become— places of refuge
for people who are seeking to avoid integrated education, it is to
o
be expected that these people will not automatically be permitted
65 y p d
to enroll their children in the Cathohc school.
.
officially supporting the Interfaith Center were in Warren. For the Interfaith Center’s
criticism of the Macomb Daily see the Racial Justice Media Task Force, “The Message Is
Violence,” copy in author’s possession; “Action Centers Combat ‘Institutional’ Racism,”
"
Warren Community News, 17-21 December 1968; “Religious Group Endorses Busing,”
g,
Daily Tribune,15 August 1972; Sally Chalgian, interview by author, 21 April 1997.
y 64
Lange, interview; “William H. Pennow School, September 30, 1971,” in Dearden
g , . , , , n
Papers.
65
“Policy Statement Regarding Enrollment in Catholic Schools,” in Dearden Papers;
see also John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth
Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 238.
y g y g , , .
g
How effective was Cardinal Dearden’s policy of restricting enrollment

of children in Catholic schools by parents seeking to escape integration? In
n
Boston, by way of comparison, after a similar directive from Cardinal
Medeiros the Catholic schools nonetheless enrolled two thousand new w
students. Cardinal Dearden, however, meant what he said. The total l
attendance in Catholic schools located in public school districts subject to
Judge Roth’s busing order declined from 1966 to 1979, with a sharp falloff
between 1970 and 1971 (see Chart 1). The two cases are not precisely
y
comparable because the busing order was actually in force in Boston, but
the data for Macomb County at least show that the Catholic Church in
metropolitan Detroit was not using busing as an incentive to recruit new
w
students. In fact, the archdiocese closed four schools in Macomb County
66
in 1971.. Two of them, St. Mark’s and Ascension,
, . ,
were located in Warren.
.
Chart I 67
Total Attendance in Macomb County Catholic Schools Located in Public School Districts
y
Subject to the Busing Order
g r
isoooi--------
16000
14000
12000
10000
8000
6000
4000
2000
1967 1968 196969 1970 1971 1972 1973 3 1974 4 1975 1976 1977 19788 11979
The resolute actions of Cardinal Dearden (whose nickname was

“Iron John”) reinforced the belief among Macomb County Catholics that
g y
66
Formisano, Boston against Busing, 210.
67
The chart data come from the Macomb County Intermediate School District Surveys
y
(1966-1979),
,
located at the offices of the Macomb Intermediate School District..
g y
he was abandoning the suburbs in his zeal to serve Detroit. This

impression was strengthened by the cardinal’s decision in March 1971 to
spend $200,000 to keep three inner-city Detroit Catholic schools open
for another year while at the same time allowing the four Catholic
schools in Macomb County to close. This decision followed a ten-day
y
sit-in by liberal priests at the cardinal’s office in support of black leaders’
68 s'
demands for aid to city schools serving mosdy black students.
8
Cardinal Dearden continued to try to calm racial anxieties
throughout the busing crisis. As the Supreme Court’s ruling loomed in
1974, Dearden circulated instructions to priests in the archdiocese
e
concerning the proper way to prepare parishioners for the
announcement of the ruling. The goal was to open the minds and hearts
of the faithful, not simply to read them a resolution prepared by the
Archdiocesan Pastoral Board. 69 Cardinal Dearden came in for bitter
criticism from parishioners: “Dear Cardinal: If you think we are going to
o
send our white children to the Black schools in Detroit where Dopers,
Rapers, Purse Snatchers, etc., the schools is full of them. And send black
Hudlums to suburban schools that dont make sense. First of all you and
your priests, nuns, etc, should go among Black Hudlums and . . . Preach
to them Gospel 10 Commandment etc. in Detroit and all over U.S. for
that matter teach them there is god and god laws. Befor we mixed our
white children with Black. . . .”70 Other critics among the Catholic
faithful rebuked the cardinal for “looking down upon us to the extent
that, as you would seem to imply, we are immoral people simply because
e
we do not accept Bussing. . . . Before I go to bed tonight I will pray that
p g. . . . g g p y
68
Macomb Daily, 16 March 1971; telephone conversation with Roman Godzak,
,
Archivist of the Archdiocese of Detroit, January 1996.
69
The cardinal suggested an approach involving “not . . . a series of discourses from
the pulpit. The discussion route is the better one. There may come a time when we will
need to use the pulpit for this purpose. But at the present time the better course seems to
o
promote discussion.” He hoped that by consolidating Catholic opinion among the laity in
the parish council and its committees, “the work then can move out through other circles
s
. . . so that people begin to talk about the issue in a serious, mature way.” In an effort to
help establish institutions that could carry on the work of antiracist education in Macomb
County suburbs, the Archdiocese also gave financial support to the Northeast Interfaith
Center for Racial Justice. Catholic parishes always housed the offices of the Interfaith
h
Center. “Archdiocese of Detroit, June 11, 1974,” in Dearden Papers; Chalgian, interview;
“Churches Fight Racism in Suburbs,” Detroit Free Press,14 September 1968; McGreevy,
, , ,
Parish Boundaries, 238.
70
“Archdiocese of Detroit, Busing 1974-76,” file 25, box 1, Dearden Administrative
, e
Papers, Archives of the Archdiocese of Detroit, Detroit, Mich.
, , , .
g w
somewhere, some way, some how you will begin to understand people.
.
For, candidly, at least at the moment, you simply do not.”71
,
The Catholic Church was not the only voice calling for racial
tolerance in the suburbs in the early 1970s. The UAW had a history of
trying to reduce racial tensions going as far back as the hate strikes of the
1940s in Detroit’s war-production factories. During the early stages of
the busing controversy, the union president, Leonard Woodcock, issued
a public statement in support of busing. It “is an inadequate solution but
given our segregated housing patterns, busing within reasonable limits
appears the only way that integration can be brought about.” In other
statements, the union took the position that the busing issue was for the
courts to decide and that more attention needed to be paid to the larger
p g
issue of defining goals for quality education.72
2
The UAW leadership thus publicly supported busing. But the union
found it difficult to lead its members effectively when the issue involved
d
racial tolerance in the community instead of the workplace. In
n
confronting the Pontiac antibusing wildcat strikers in the fall of 1971, the
union’s GM Department tried to dissuade members from resorting to
o
work stoppages to express their opposition to busing, in part because of
the union’s contractual obligations to the General Motors Company.
But, with the exception of this incident and a couple of local
membership meetings in the Pontiac area where Irving Bluestone spoke
on the busing question, the top leadership was unable to reach many of
its white members in the Detroit suburbs. George Merrelli, the union’s
regional director in Macomb County, took a hands-off attitude. A few
months earlier he had embarrassed himself by failing to convince a
roomful of local UAW officers living in Warren that they should vote
against a grass-roots referendum renouncing HUD money tied to
measures encouraging black residency in Warren.73
3
Douglas Fraser recalls that on the general topic of racism the union
made continual efforts to educate the membership. The programs at the
e
FDR Camp near Port Huron and at other education centers around the
country were racially integrated, and local union leaders who attended
those retreats learned the UAW policy on fighting racism. But Fraser
p y g g .
71
Ibid..
72
For the racial strife during World War II, see Dominic Capeci, Jr., Race 'Relations in
Wartime Detroit (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984); Woodcock quotation in
p y , q n
73
Bluestone and Fraser, interview. O n George Merrelli’s debate with Richard
d
Sabaugh, see Riddle, “HUD and the Open Housing Controversy,” 26.
g , , g , .
g sy
remembers that the members had different attitudes about segregation at work
k
and in the community: “Brendan Sexton was our Education Director and he
e
used to have these surveys of attitudes before and after these educational
programs. And to the question, Do you believe in equality in the workplace?’
the response was ‘absolutely!’ on seniority, wages, etc. But then you get
into the more personal questions, ‘What about in your neighborhood?’ and,
,
of course, this was fifty years ago, but they drew the line there.” 74
4
Educating the membership on the union’s general policy of
f
antiracism was one thing. Trying to provide leadership on the hot topic
of cross- dis trict busing was another. Douglas Fraser confesses, “There
are certain issues that you ran into where there was so much passion that
t
you just got overwhelmed. . . .” The top leadership might take the most
liberal positions, but the top leadership did not have to stand for election
n
by the rank and file. “We were sort of immune,” he notes. “We could say
y
all these things and pass all these resolutions,” but the officers of a local
l
union were in a different position. “You had to look at their situation,
where they’re looking at an election in a year or two. They might step out
t
and take some risk, but they’re not going to be suicidal. In terms of
f
getting it down on the shop floor, that would be a risk that, I guess,
, , g ,
people were unwilling to take.”75
p p 5
The antiracist principles of the top leadership meant little to
members whose local leadership was unwilling to act on those principles.
The union’s ability to exert its will on issues of racial equality inside the
plants did not extend to the neighborhoods. As Fraser remembers, going
all the way back to the hate strikes of the 1940s “all of us instinctively
y
knew that [on issues of race in the shops], if you bent, if you showed any
y
semblance of prejudice or bigotry, the issue would be lost.” But racial
integration in the community was a different matter. “We didn’t have the
.
same influence that we did in the workplace.”76
6
Like the Vietnam War, cross-district busing helped to disorganize
the Democratic party in southeastern Michigan. Both issues split the
e
party’s leaders from its rank and file. The antiwar Democrats moved the
party leaders to the left while the issue of busing moved the rank and file
e
the other way. On the issue of busing, Democratic party leaders tried to
address racial integration in ways that reached out to the party’s black
constituents without alienating the suburban white working class. This
g g . s
74
Bluestone and Fraser,, interview..
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid..
g
led state party leaders to adopt a wishy-washy endorsement of busing, a

position that pleased no one and angered conservative suburban
Democrats. Thus the efforts of Democratic party leaders to shore up a
working coalition between urban blacks and suburban and outstate
whites only contributed to the growing sense of mutual distrust between
w g
the suburbs and the city of Detroit.
Democratic party leaders made the mistake of straddling the issue.
At a news conference on 29 September 1971, the chairman of the state
party, James McNeely, stated that busing was, perhaps, “the only way” to
o
eliminate educational inequality in Michigan. McNeely was merely
restating the lukewarm endorsement of busing that the Democratic State
e
Central Committee had just adopted at a meeting in Battle Creek. There
the vote had been 67-40 in favor of the wording: “We accept busing as
an imperfect and temporary mechanism to help erase the imbalances in
our educational system.” Eleven of the state’s top Democratic party
leaders, including Attorney General Frank Kelley and Senator Philip
p
Hart, endorsed this position. But only one of Macomb County’s
s
delegates voted for it. Seven voted against it and one abstained. 77
g . g . 7
77
Macomb Daily, 30 September, 1, 5, 27 October 1971; 9 March 1972; Dudley Buffa,
Union Power and American Democraty: The UAW' and the Democratic Party, 1935-72 (Ann
n
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 191. One illustration of the gulf that
separated the state party leaders from Macomb County’s rank-and-file Democrats was the
speech that Senator Philip Hart gave on 16 October 1971 at the fifth annual Phil Hart t
Day dinner hosted by the Macomb County Democratic party in Mount Clemens. A
revered figure in the national Democratic party, Hart had a sterling reputation for honesty
esty
and integrity. Coming directly to the topic of busing in his remarks at the dinner, Hart
t
acknowledged the political and practical weaknesses of busing and attested to the sincerity
y
of those who favored neighborhood schools out of concern for their children’s safety. He
stated that no one should be “accused of bigotry” for reluctance to have his or her child
bused “to a school where the education is the same or worse than the one within walking
distance or if you think the new environment might be hostile.” But there were certain
moral lines that he could not bring himself to cross, and he went on to declare simply that
t
“racial segregation in public schools is wrong,” and that busing was justified “on those
occasions when a constitutional guarantee [to equal education] can’t be delivered any
other way.” The applause was sparse, and the Phil Hart Day dinner was never held again.
Three days later, a meeting of Roseville-NAG voted to mount a recall campaign against
Hart, who had polled overwhelmingly in those precincts in the last election. The recall
campaign fizzled, but Hart’s attempt to reason with Macomb County Democrats over the
busing question also failed. Macomb Daily,18 October 1971; Dudley Buffa, Union Power and
nd
American Democraty: The UM If 7 and the Democratic Party, 1972-83 (Ann Arbor: University of
of
Michigan Press, 1984), 7-10; Michael O’Brien, Philip Hart: The Conscience of the Senate (East
- t
Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995), 185-88.
ans ng g y , , .
g y
As antibusing sentiment intensified, state party leaders lost their

influence over Macomb County Democrats. The general outcry against
busing isolated the liberals in the party leadership, disrupting their channels
of authority at the county level. Congressman James O’Hara, whose district
included Warren, soon felt the heat from his antibusing constituents.
O’Hara was astute enough to read the situation early and come out against
t
busing. He arranged photo opportunities to receive antibusing petitions
from his district and announced early in October 1971 that he would “take
a leading role” in calling for a constitutional amendment banning busing.
But in March he failed to sign House Resolution 620, which would have
released the bill from committee. The reaction was swift, as three hundred
antibusing activists picketed his district offices. Antibusing groups like Save
Our Children and the Roseville Action Group attacked O’Hara in a mailing
to twenty- five hundred county residents. They pledged to picket an
n
upcoming O’Hara dinner dance and to make a list of any Macomb County
politicians who attended the event. O’Hara soon signed the resolution to
78 . g o
release the bill from committee. .
Busing wrought a transformation in Warren’s politics that was evident
in the tumultuous response to George Wallace in the 1972 Michigan
n
presidential preference primary on 16 May. The primary coincided with
mounting tension over Judge Roth’s expected order for cross-district
busing, and the Wallace campaign focused on the busing issue. Although
h
the state Democratic party leaders did their best to deflate Wallace’s
popularity in Michigan, antibusing activists asked Wallace to speak at a rally
in Warren. The mayor and several city councilmen were there to welcome
him. The Alabama governor stood before a cheering crowd and declared
that he had never heard of anything “so cruel or asinine as busing little
school children.” Two days earlier, George McGovern had puzzled
onlookers at the Macomb Mall in neighboring Roseville when he promised
d
that as president he would implement the court’s busing ruling, even
though he personally opposed cross-district busing. Perhaps even more
frustrating was his statement that busing was “an overblown issue.” Few
people in Warren were surprised when McGovern received only 16 percent
t
of the city’s votes in the primary and 35 percent in the general election.
y p y p g .
78
Macomb Daily,15 May 1972. On O’Hara’s soul-searching with regard to the busing
g g g
issue,, see Buffa,,Union Power . .. .. 1935-72,
.
190-91.
, .
40 Michigan Historical'Review
4 g w
The busing crisis led many Democrats to vote against the party’s
y
standard-bearer..79
Meanwhile, in other primaries several liberal Macomb County
Democratic incumbents scrambled to stay in office. N o political office
seeker was too great or too humble to escape antibusing anger. One
e
teachers’ union organizer with moderate views on busing lost an
election for precinct delegate in neighboring St. Clair Shores even
n
though he was unopposed: “I was running unopposed and I got a call
l
at maybe ten or eleven the night before Election Day. The person said,
‘I understand that you’re in favor of cross-district busing.’ And I said,
,
‘I don’t know that I’m in favor of it. I think it might be one of the
e
ways to improve education for all the kids.’ That next morning, they
y
were out there at 7 o’clock with their write-in stickers. And I got beat . . .
80 . ...
probably four- or five-to-one.”
p 0
Initially Michigan’s Republicans had been as startled as the Democratss
over the busing issue. When asked his reaction to the possibility of cross-
district busing in September 1971, Republican State Representative David
Serotkin from Mount Clemens sidestepped the issue, “This is not really a
state legislative issue, and I cannot speak on it. . . . I’m learning about it just
as my constituents are.” Republican State Chairman William McLaughlin
took a moderate stand when the busing controversy burst on the scene: “If
f
the election were held today, it would be the number one issue. . . . My
great hope is that it comes out of the political arena and we get more
reasons and less rhetoric.” Although Republican Governor William
Milliken opposed busing, he also opposed an antibusing constitutional
amendment, and he went out of his way to slam George Wallace as a racist
an e wen ou o s way g t
demagogue. 81
1
In the end the Republicans could not ignore the political opportunity
y
that busing offered. Nixon had announced in the spring of 1970 that
although his Justice Department would enforce school desegregation in those
districts (mosdy in the South) where segregation was de jure, a matter of law
and local ordinance, he would not attack de facto (customary) school
l
segregation resulting from housing patterns. The impEcation was that Nixon
segrega on resu ng rom ous ng pa . p
79
Wallace quotation in Macomb Daily, 15 May 1972; McGovern quotation in Macomb
a on n a y, y
Daily, 12 May 1972.
y 80
Lange, interview.
81
Serotkin quotation in Alacomb Daily, 1 October 1971; McLaughlin quotation in
Macomb Daily, 27 October 1971. For Milliken’s position on busing, see “Milliken Blasts
s
Wallace Tactics,” Macomb Daily, 17 March 1972; and “None Pleased by Milliken Busing
arc ; y g
View,” Macomb Daily, 3 March 1972.
, y, .
g y
intended to let places like Warren off the hook. O f course this did not
t
prevent Judge Roth from finding de jure segregation in the Detroit school
system. And both the Sixth District Court of Appeals and the Supreme
e
Court upheld this aspect of Judge Roth’s rulings. But Nixon’s statement
communicated his reluctance to press the matter. Similarly, Nixon’s
s
December 1970 statement, following the HUD controversy over open
n
housing in Warren, that “it is not the policy of this government to use
the power of the federal government or federal funds . . . in ways not
required by law for forced integration of the suburbs” implied that he
e
intended to move slowly on residential segregation between cities and
82 y g g
suburbs..
On 17 May 1972, musing over the upcoming campaign, Nixon
remarked in a memo to John Ehrlichman, “Lead in on the busing issue
on a state and local basis. . . . Hit busing hard in Michigan.” Nixon
n
tried to make his opposition to busing known in southeastern
n
Michigan. The Macomb Daily often accommodated him, as in the story
it pieced together out of a letter that the president wrote to U.S.
Representative William S. Broomfield (R-Royal Oak) congratulating
him on his antibusing amendment to the Higher Education Act. These
statements assured many of Warren’s antibusing Democrats that the
g e
president was on their side.83
p 3
Following the 1972 presidential primary and the national
conventions, the gravity of the Democratic party’s situation in
n
Macomb County began to sink in. Democratic party regulars found
d
themselves in an impossible bind: George McGovern’s nomination,
g ,
82
O n Nixon’s pronouncements concerning de jure and de facto segregation, see New
w
York Times, 25 March 1970. On Nixon’s statement concerning “forced integration of the
suburbs,” see Detroit News, 11 December 1970; Riddle, “Reagan Democrats,” chapter 2;
and Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Hand: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed
g g
America (New York: Vintage, 1992), 209.
83
Nixon’s quotation from “President re Ehrlichman file,” Ehrlichman Files, folder
r
3, box 24 (release of papers contested), Nixon Presidential Materials Project, National
Archives II, College Park, Maryland. Thanks to Melvin Small for this reference. On
n
Nixon’s letter to Broomfield, see Macomb Daily, 29 June 1972. Representative
Broomfield’s amendment had no bearing on the Bradley v. Milliken lawsuit because it did
d
not apply to busing cases already in federal court. By the 1972 election, the state’s
Republicans had decided where their advantage lay. They tried to attract antibusing
Democrats by adopting an antibusing plank in the party’s platform. The wording of the
resolution did not address the question of the tactics of opposition to busing. It merely
recorded the party’s opposition: “While we believe in and will continue to work for equal
educational opportunity for all children, we believe that this cannot be achieved, and
, d
should not be sought, by forced busing programs.” Macomb Daily,12 June 1972.
g , y gp g . y, .
g w
plus the busing plank in the national party platform, struck

Democratic county leaders like County Chairman John Bruff as s
political suicide. In mid-July they released a “county platform” "
opposing busing. This position paper urged the adoption of a
constitutional amendment prohibiting the “forced busing of school l
children.” The statement pointedly failed to mention the national l
party’s presidential nominee, George McGovern.84 4
p
George Wallace’s announcement that he would not run on aa
third-party ticket in 1972 further aided the Republicans. Warren’ss
mayor, Ted Bates, became a “Democrat for Nixon” in September.
Two more Macomb County mayors, Al Martin of Sterling Heights
and Walter Bezz of East Detroit, signed on in support both of Nixonn
and of Robert Griffin, who was running for reelection to the U.S.
Senate against Michigan Attorney General Frank Kelley. In the e
general election, Kelley, who had originally endorsed the state partyy
resolution of qualified support for busing, tried unsuccessfully to o
shift his position. Kelley lost to Griffin, who campaigned heavily on
n
the busing issue. As Douglas Fraser recalls, “I remember Frankk
Kelley ran for Senator, and Bob Griffin beat him. . . . I was chairmann
of Michigan CAP [the UAW political action committee]. And I
I
invited Frank [to speak] right after the election and he got up and
said, T got hit by a yellow bus on my way to Washington.’”85
sa
The cross-district busing controversy finally subsided on 25 July
- y
1974 when, in a 5 to 4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Judge
Roth’s order for the massive two-way busing of students between
y g n
84
At the 1972 state Democratic convention, the party took no action on a number of
f
antibusing resolutions that were up for consideration. The same thing happened at the
e
national Democratic convention in Miami Beach. In spite of local opposition, the national
busing resolution flady declared that busing “is another tool to accomplish desegregation. It
. It
must continue to be available.” The Michigan delegation included many grass-roots busing
foes, however. As a result of the 51 percent Wallace victory in the primary election, a
a
majority of the Michigan delegation was pledged to Wallace for the first two rounds of
f
balloting on the presidential nomination. The Macomb County delegation was even more
lopsidedly in the Wallace camp. The fact that labor delegates were completely excluded from
rom
the Macomb County delegation underlined the strange situation that busing had created. The
The
Michigan delegation voted 8-2 in favor of a platform resolution (that went down to defeat)
t)
calling for a constitutional amendment prohibiting busing for racial balance. “Area Dems
. s
Reject Busing, Endorse ‘County Platform,’” Macomb Daily, 17 July 1972.
e ec 8 5
Bluestone and Fraser, interview. O n Frank Kelley’s defeat, see “What is Your
r
Position on Busing? An Open Letter from U.S. Senator Robert P. Griffin to Attorney
General Frank Kelley,” a full-page ad in Macomb Daily, 28 July 1972; and ibid., 13 July, 21, 22
ey, a u -page a n y, y ., , , 22
September 1972.
p .
g y
Detroit and its suburbs. The majority opinion written by Chief

f
Justice Warren Burger declared that although the Detroit School
Board was guilty of de jure segregation, the transportation of students
could not include the suburbs because there was insufficient
evidence that the suburbs were guilty of de jure segregation.
Consequently, the limit of the “constitutional right of the Negro
[children] residing in Detroit is to attend a unitary school system in
n
that district.” Justice Douglas wrote an impassioned dissent in which
he predicted: “When we rule against the metropolitan area remedy,
we take a step that will likely put the problems of the blacks and our
society back to a period . . . of separate [and unequal].”86
6
Having upheld Judge Roth’s finding of segregation in the Detroit
school system even as they voted down his remedy of metropolitan
n
busing, the Supreme Court now sent the question of remedy back to
o
the federal district court. Judge Robert DeMascio, who was assigned
d
the case after Judge Roth died on 11 July 1974, put together a quality
education package for the Detroit schools. He ordered the busing of
f
twenty-two thousand students inside the school district. (By now 65
5
percent of the 220,000 students in the system were black, and busing
hastened the white students’ departure.) Judge DeMascio ordered a
revised student code of conduct and a citywide reading program.
These measures were supposed to make up for the second-class
educational experience that the school board had provided
generations of black students. Some black leaders, like Arthur
Johnson, were deeply disappointed and considered Judge DeMascio’s
quality education reforms mere tokenism. Judge DeMascio ordered
the State of Michigan to pay the $70 million cost of the reforms. The
state appealed this order, and three years later the Supreme Court
, y p
upheld Judge DeMascio.87
p 7
What were the results of the busing controversy? Some observers
believe that the 1974 Bradley v. Milliken decision ended up increasing
y . p ng
86
Quoted in Dimond, Beyond Busing,110-14.
87
Some experts on desegregation maintain that Bradley v. Milliken heralded the beginning of
the end of school desegregation: “Rejection of city-suburban desegregation brought an end to
the period of rapidly increasing school desegregation for black students, which began in
n
1965. No longer was the most segregation found among schools in the same community; the
starkest racial separations occurred between city and suburban school districts within a
metropolitan area. But Milliken made this segregation almost untouchable. By 1991, African
n
Americans in Michigan were more segregated than those of any other state.” Orfield and
g g y . e and
Eaton, Dismantling Desegregation,12.
, g g g , .
g w
segregation in southeastern Michigan. Although they see the world

d
from quite different perspectives, Arthur Johnson, George Bushnell,
Jr., and Alexander Ritchie agree on this: the outcome of Bradley v.
Milliken impoverished the city and contributed to the mutual
l
estrangement of the white and black people of southeastern
Michigan. Ritchie remembers his reaction to the news of the
Supreme Court’s 1974 decision:
:
I learned about it in the staff room of the Detroit Free Press.. . . I I

almost broke into tears. I was speechless. . . . [Had the ruling
g
gone the other way] Detroit would not have been an all-black
k
city. . . . It would have saved the city. . . . [If we had gotten
n
cross-district busing], there would have been no motivation
for the whites to move to the suburbs. . . . My clients felt
that if they were going to get cross-district busing, that they
were not going to move, because there was no incentive to
,
move.. 88
George Bushnell, Jr., the original attorney for the Detroit School
Board in the Bradley v. Milliken lawsuit, agrees that the busing
g
controversy had an immediate negative effect on the city, through
h
white flight. According to Bushnell, this created the conditions for a
a
bitter and uncooperative relationship between Detroit, under the
administration of the city’s first black mayor, Coleman Young, and the
rest of southeastern Michigan. The cross-district busing controversy
y
“confirmed in the minds of the black community what they had already
become convinced of through other experiences, namely that the white
community did not care to have anything to do with them. It made for
r
very, very angry relations between the black and white populations of
p p
southeastern Michigan.”89
Arthur Johnson believes that the remedy imposed by Judge
DeMascio was grossly inadequate and that the judicial and political
systems allowed white society to escape its responsibility to deal
equitably with Detroit’s black schoolchildren. This reinforced
d
Johnson’s pessimistic view of the future of race relations:
p
88
Ritchie, interview. .
89
Bushnell,, interview. .
g y
Nothing really worked. Not integration [and not the promise

e
to upgrade the Detroit school system]. I came to the
realization that a system . . . that will not tolerate some rational
l
measures leading to integration cannot be trusted to make
these funds available to do the job otherwise. And the black
k
community in Detroit today . . . demonstrates this in the
condition of our public schools. . . . So we have today the
legacy of this system. I must say that it is a condition . . . that
leads me to the conclusion that there is no solution to thee
problem [of racial segregation].90
p g g . 0
Another ironic outcome of the busing controversy is that it

marked the beginning of an enrollment decline in Warren’s own
schools. In 1971, the year when cross-district busing became front-
page news, enrollment peaked and started to decline in Macomb
b
County schools (see Chart 2). After 1971 the enrollment in the
Macomb County public school districts named in Judge Roth’s
busing order steadily fell off, while the districts excluded from the
e
busing order continued to gain students. Although this decline
e
stemmed in part from the graduation of the early baby boomers and
the lower birth rates in the mid- and late-1960s, another reason for r
the trend is that the fear of busing prompted young families to move
farther north, outside the likely boundaries of the busing order. A
A
former school administrator recalls that his office began hearing of
f
this out-migration in the midst of the busing crisis: “They moved or
they moved their kids [to reside, legally, with relatives living north of
the busing zone]. That’s one thing that you can really trace. The
student population in Macomb County dropped precipitously. . . .
We had lots of reports from St. Clair Shores and East Detroit—in
n
that southern tier—across to Van Dyke and Fitzgerald. You had a
large number of kids leaving, and the requests for records would go
o
to [the school districts]. The administrators knew that this was
91 . s was
happening.”
pp g. 1
90
Johnson, interview.
91 .
Lange, interview.
g , .
g w
Chart 292
Total Attendance in Macomb County Public Schools s
120000
100000
80000 /
n
■ Bus
1111 NIMM
60000 -
■ No Bus
II II
40000
II I III
20000 j
1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980
When informed in July 1974 that the Supreme Court had just
overturned Judge Roth’s busing order, one young mother interviewed at
t
the Macomb shopping mall said, “We’re moving out to St. Clair County
[north of Macomb County] soon because we thought [cross-district
t
busing] would go through. Maybe we wouldn’t have decided to move so
far if it weren’t for busing, but the house is almost finished.” 93
Another outcome of the cross-district busing controversy was that it
t
unified Warren in opposition to federally imposed racial integration.
During the 1970 HUD referendum the opposition to open housing had
d
been heaviest along Warren’s southern boundary with Detroit. This was
because Warren’s south side was widely expected to be a beachhead for
black migration out of Detroit into the suburbs. But in the 1972 advisory
y
referendum on busing the opposition was much more evenly distributed
among Warren’s voting precincts. The fact that the whole city of Warren
n
was under the proposed busing order created the conditions for a
citywide united front against busing. 94
y g g.
92
The chart data come from the Macomb County Intermediate School District Surveys
y
(1966-1979), located at the offices of the Macomb Intermediate School District.
93 .
Macomb Daily, 26 July 1974.
94
Riddle, “HUD and the Open Housing Controversy.”
, ."
g y
The busing controversy also shaped Warren’s citizens’ views of the

federal government. During the 1950s and 1960s Warren’s white working
g
class welcomed the benefits showered on it by the federal
l
government— Veterans Administration programs, the income tax
deduction for mortgage interest, and federally funded highways were
among the most popular. But the pressure applied by HUD to integrate
Warren’s neighborhoods in 1970, plus the threat of cross-district busing
g
a few months later, revealed the coercive side of federal policy. 95
After years of agitating and organizing, the antibusing activists
s
watched the Supreme Court overturn Judge Roth’s busing order. They
were elated— it seemed that they had forced the government to stop
p
interfering in their right to make fundamental decisions for their
children. In waging this fight the antibusing movement transformed and
d
energized Warren’s political life. As one antibusing activist put it, the
busing controversy was “a phenomenon . . . that was really interesting
because so many people at the grass-roots level became involved, and the
politicians followed the people, which is the way it should be.” In a revealing
contrast, a liberal union official confesses that the busing issue “got
t
people involved in politics who never had been, people who perhaps had
never even bothered to vote before. . It was the worst issue I ever
96
encountered.” . 6
95
Of course, HUD’s compliance officers could reply that by threatening to suspend
d
the neighborhood development funds that Warren had applied for they were merely
y
upholding federal legislation such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1968 Civil
Rights Act (also called the Fair Housing Act). Those laws stated that communities
receiving HUD grants had to enforce the civil rights laws. But the city administration of
Warren and in particular the Warren Police Department never seemed to be able to
o
locate, arrest, and prosecute even one of the individuals responsible for harassing black
people and burning crosses on the front lawns of the few African Americans who tried to
o
settle in Warren. Riddle, “HUD and the Open Housing Controversy,” 1-6.
96
Richard Sabaugh, interview (emphasis added); union official quoted by Dudley
Buffa, Union Power . . . 1935-72, 191. This picture of emergent citizen activism instead of
f
the more common stereotype of an inert electorate is significant. Certainly, many people
e
who lived in Warren went to work every day obhvious to the constitutional issues that
their neighbors were testing in the streets. As C. Wright Mills explains, “mass society”
was, paradoxically, a denial of public society. Cold War suburban culture expressed the
e
antipublic values of privacy and refuge in the family. Suburban space was a sanctuary
y
from urban conflict. Warren was just such a place—a bedroom community where people
fled the conflicts of the city. What makes the busing controversy interesting is that it ran
counter to this apolitical quiescence. Instead the cross-district busing movement
t
occasioned the largest and most sustained non-work-related protests in the city’s history.
.
See C. Wright Mills’s classic discussion of “the political ‘rear guard’” in White Collar (New
. g p g w
g
The busing controversy in Warren was about more than race, but the
e
racial aspect of the struggle helped to define Warren’s political culture.
The controversy provoked a bitter response from Warren’s white
working-class homeowners who felt that they had already been driven
from their old neighborhoods in Detroit The embedded memories of
f
interracial competition over housing in Detroit fueled the antibusing
g
movement in the suburbs.. These memories formed a kind of exodus s
* 97
narrative of white flight. In addition to blockbusting, this narrative
recalled interracial violence in the high schools as Detroit’s
s
neighborhoods underwent racial change. For older whites the exodus
s
signified a disorderly retreat spurred by fear of being “the last white on
n
the block.” It was a story of self-inflicted economic and emotional loss
accompanying the white abandonment of Detroit. This victimization/ exodus
myth became part of the suburban identity, even for some residents who had
m y,
never lived in Detroit. 988
The irony of the cross-district busing plan for metropolitan Detroit
is that it brought about the very evil it sought to avoid. The public policy
y
aspects of busing seem to have played a prominent part in Judge Roth’s
s
thinking. He apparently wanted to discourage white flight and reverse the
e
trend toward increasing racial segregation in southeastern Michigan. For
this reason, he took seriously the concerns of the Citizens’ Committee
for Better Education, composed of parents of white students in the
Detroit school district. They were the remnants of an older movement of
. y
York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 324-54; for the home-centered culture of the Cold
War period see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
a
(New York: Basic Books, 1988).
97
Blockbusting occurred when realtors and banks reversed their practice of containing
the black population through racial steering, housing covenants, or redlining, and instead
sold openly to blacks. This compressed the cycle of home ownership, as whites
s
typically panicked and sold under value. The pent-up black demand for housing
assured realtors of sales and the banks of plenty of mortgage applicants. The
neighborhoods undergoing blockbusting could readily be identified by the “For Sale”
g g "
signs in many front yards.
98
This process often involved exchanging good, inexpensive, and paid-off housing
for more expensive, but relatively inferior, housing. After describing the attractive
piasterwork, the marble windowsills, and the leaded glass doors of the Detroit house that
he had just put on the market, one homeowner complained: “The suburban homes,
especially the newer ones, got plasterboard walls and plywood floors. But they’re not in
the city, so they’re worth more. So I’m getting ripped off. . . . Now I’m going to have to
get a big mortgage for a house in Warren, a house that is not as good as the one I just
sold.” Paul Wrobel, Our Way: Family, Parish, and Neighborhood in a Polish-American Community
y
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 134-35.
y , , .
g y
white racial retrenchment in Detroit. But regardless of their motivation,

the pleadings of their attorney, Alexander Ritchie, gave Judge Roth the
opportunity to consider the Detroit school crisis from the perspective of
f
class rather than race. Had the political leaders of both Warren and
d
Detroit adopted a similar viewpoint, the outcome of the busing
g
controversy might have been quite different. But the stunning size of
Judge Roth’s busing order, plus the distrust that Warren’s citizens already
y
felt for the federal government, sent events spinning out of control. By
y
the early 1970s any liberal consensus that might once have shaped public
opinion was crumbling as black people asserted their political leadership
in Detroit and as white people continued to flock to the suburbs. In this
context, Judge Roth’s ruling ran afoul of a conservative revival both in
n
Warren’s neighborhoods and on the U.S. Supreme Court. Thus, Detroit
,
became the most segregated metropolitan area in the nation.
g g p .
David Riddle, who lives in Detroit, teaches part time at Wayne State
e
University and is working on a book on Detroit labor attorney Ernest
Goodman. Thanks to Charlie Hyde for suggesting that this dissertation
chapter might make an article. Thanks to Steve Babson and George
Corsetti for criticism. And thanks to David Macleod and Mary Graham
y
for being firm but patient.
g p .

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Race and Reaction in Warren, Michigan, 1971 to 1974: ’’Bradley v .

Milliken” and the Cross-

of white and black students in fifty-three school districts (including

the area was a township prior to suburban development and municipal

Thus, Warren’s school systems were undergoing complex fiscal pressures at

school system . . . and problems of equal opportunity in education loomed

It was with the understanding that these issues would be addressed

students from overcrowded schools to other black schools rather than to

The administrative problems of the underfunded Detroit school

As we began to focus more and more on education problems .

of Public Act 244, which mandated the decentralization of Detroit

I sincerely believed . . . that a local school district, a small school

problems of working parents, both black and white. They had

At first the group floundered. It attempted to file a lawsuit and then

Judge Roth was bom in a small village in Austria-Hungary and grew up

of testimony were devoted to describing residential segregation in

testimony. He’s an honest judge. . . . [The plaintiffs] have at least one

Ritchie was in an enviable position. He not only had a mandate from

children’s education. And if their children were to be bused, the CCBE

incumbent, Ted Bates, and challenger Richard Sabaugh. Bates was a

Busing protest meeting at Fitzgerald High School, 27 September 1971

The issue also had an impact on mainstream political institutions like

Sometimes antibusing zealots targeted one individual. The main

sharing water-purification or sewage- treatment systems was seen as a

part of a larger communist-directed effort to sap the nation’s strength.

Motors Fisher Body plant to protest busing. UAW officials, including

One significant feature of the antibusing movement in Warren was

at Lois E. Carter Junior High School, 1 October 1971

pronouncements of these educational leaders helped to legitimize the

noting, with a disarming lack of modesty, “You are here tonight

on 23 April, the march immediately received the blessing and support of

All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Map courtesy o f the Detroit News

Other voices of moderation included some teachers and school

Parents, who have demonstrated no previous interest in Catholic

How effective was Cardinal Dearden’s policy of restricting enrollment

The resolute actions of Cardinal Dearden (whose nickname was

he was abandoning the suburbs in his zeal to serve Detroit. This

led state party leaders to adopt a wishy-washy endorsement of busing, a

As antibusing sentiment intensified, state party leaders lost their

plus the busing plank in the national party platform, struck

Detroit and its suburbs. The majority opinion written by Chief

segregation in southeastern Michigan. Although they see the world

I learned about it in the staff room of the Detroit Free Press.. . . I I

Nothing really worked. Not integration [and not the promise

Another ironic outcome of the busing controversy is that it

The busing controversy also shaped Warren’s citizens’ views of the

white racial retrenchment in Detroit. But regardless of their motivation,

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