THE BOUNDARIES OF RESPONSIBILITY INTERPRETATIONS OF GEOGRAPHY IN SCHOOL DESEGREGATION CASES

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Abstract
The year 1994 is the twentieth anniversary of Milliken v. Bradley, 18 U.S. 717 (1974). It thus marks the halfway point between Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), and the present. It also marks the point in legal history at which the struggle against racially segregated education was turned back at the Detroit city limits. In this paper I examine how social actors strategically deployed legal concepts in efforts to reshape geographies of race and racism in the Detroit metropolitan area. My emphasis, though, is on how understandings of geographical phenomena were advanced in Milliken in order to justify legal arguments. In arguments and judgments, claims about the causes of segregation and about the spatiality of identity, agency, community, and intentionality were woven together into strategic geographical narratives that were designed to justify—or to justify the denial of—federal judicial intervention in the local spatial restructuring of race and schooling.

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