Containing Black Utopia: A Conversation with Aaron Robertson and Michelle Adams

In this special live episode, Donna and Orlando reunite for a book talk at the Charles H. Wright Museum in collaboration with Next Chapter Books. 

This compelling book talk featured two exceptional Detroit authors: Aaron Robertson, author of The Black Utopians, and Michelle Adams, author of The Containment. Together, they explored the enduring relevance of Black Utopia, freedom, and justice in a timely conversation about history, place, and the futures we imagine.

To purchase copies of The Black Utopians and/or The Containment, click here.

Transcript

Orlando Bailey 0:00

Hello, Detroit in the world. Welcome to another episode of Authentically Detroit broadcasting live from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American history. I'm Orlando Bailey.

Donna Givens Davidson 0:11

And I'm Donna Givens Davidson.

Orlando Bailey 0:13

Thank you for joining us and supporting our efforts to build a platform of authentic voices for real people in the city of Detroit. We want you to like, rate, and subscribe to the Authentically Detroit Podcast on all platforms. I am certainly excited to be back on the Authentically Detroit podcast after about five months. Hi, Donna Givens Davidson.

Donna Givens Davidson 0:34

I missed you.

Orlando Bailey 0:34

I missed you too. And it's been it's been a minute since I read that intro. I had to start it over. But I'm really, I'm really happy to be here. Listen, uh, we're excited to be here today celebrating two amazing authors from the city of Detroit. Aaron Robertson is a writer, journalist, Italian translator, and former book editor. Currently, he's serving as the inaugural centennial fellow at Commonwealth Magazine, and is also a 2026 to 2028 Tulsa Artist Fellow. His nonfiction debut, The Black Utopians Searching for Paradise in the Promised Land in America, won the Bridge Book Award for American Nonfiction and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Hooks National Book Award, and the Zorra Award for Nonfiction. It was named a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington Post's best nonfiction book of 2024, one of Time Magazine's 100 must-read books of 2024, one of the New York Public Library's 10 best books of 2024, and a 2025 Michigan Notable Book. It was also recognized as the a best book of the 2024 by The New Yorker, the Boston Globe, The Republic, L Essence Literary Hub Book List, and the Chicago Public Library. Y'all give it a Michelle Adams was born and grew up in Detroit. She is the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Go Blue! Go All right, I heard y'all. And her research centers on race, discrimination, school desegregation, affirmative action, and housing law. Adams is the author of The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, which tells the story of the critical desegregation struggle that ended the Brown B Board of Education era. The former co-director of the Floresheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Benjamin and Cardozo School of Law, she served on the Biden administration's presidential commission on the Supreme Court and as an expert commentator on the Netflix series Amend, The Fight for America, and the Showtime series Deadlocked, How America Shaped the Supreme Court. Adams is the winner of the 2024 L. Hart Wright Teaching Award. She has published in the Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Texas Law Review, and other scholarly journals. Her work also has appeared in the popular media, including a piece in the New Yorker commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. Please give a warm welcome to Michelle Adams, everybody.

Donna Givens Davidson 3:27

And if I might, and her book has also won several awards, including, I'm told, an award last night.

unknown 3:36

That is great.

Donna Givens Davidson 3:37

Okay, talk about that for a minute.

SPEAKER_06 3:38

It was great. The Hillman Award, the Hillman Foundation. Use the mic. I'm gonna use the mic. Hello, everybody. Last night I was very fortunate to be in New York and to win the Hillman Award for Book Journalism, which was fantastic. And I'm delighted to be here this evening.

Donna Givens Davidson 4:03

Okay. Well, I have so many questions for um both of you because I read both of your books before we planned this. And so the opportunity to sit down and talk to you, I have to say, is really inspiring to me. Um you've inspired so much of my own scholarship and my reading and writing and talking. So first of all, thank you for joining us. That means a lot. Thank you. Thanks. It's great to be here. Yeah, so um, all right. So, Michelle, I'm gonna start with some questions for you. Um, what got you started on this topic of school desegregation in Detroit? What what how how did you end up talking about the Millikan decision?

SPEAKER_06 4:35

Thank you for the question. Um, my book is about a case called Millikan versus Bradley, which was decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1974. I'm a constitutional law professor. And for many, many years I had taught this case. It's sort of dry, doesn't seem like it's that interesting. Uh it takes place in Detroit. I'm a native of Detroit. And I kept reading it and kept reading it. You know how sometimes you get this feeling that there's something there and you're not exactly sure what it is. Uh and the more I read, the more I wanted to read. And at some point I realized there was just an amazing story behind this case. And it was a story that I felt like I was well positioned to be able to tell because I'm from the city. And the more I learned, the more I realized that I was gonna have to develop a bunch of different kinds of talents to be able to tell the story. And so I rolled up my sleeves and I learned how to ar how to go into an archive, I learned how to interview folks, uh, and ended up writing uh this story about Milliken versus Bradley because it became something that I was basically obsessed with. And because it because it drew me in and it ended up being a very important story around school desegregation uh and why our our world looks the way it looks today.

Donna Givens Davidson 5:47

Yeah, you know, we think of school desegregation, we always think of the South. Um I grew up in Detroit when you grew up in Detroit, and I knew nothing about this school desegregation case. I learned about it as an adult, you know, Milliken versus Bradley, but I knew very little. The interesting thing is though, this battle was a little bit different than in the South, because in the South it was a matter where almost every black person in those southern communities was fighting for integration. But in Detroit, it was a little different. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_06 6:16

Yeah. Um this is really important. You make a great point, Donna, which is that when we think about Brown versus Board of Education, everybody's heard about Brown. We uh we think about Jim Crow, we think about segregated water fountains, we think about segregated schools. Um but what was less well known was that in a place like Detroit, in Chicago, and Seattle and Los Angeles and across the West and the North, we basically had a system of northern Jim Crow. Um we had a we had a nationwide policy of Jim Crow, but it had different regional variations. And the variation that we had here was that there was no law that required students to be segregated in schools, but in fact they were anyway. And the reason that they were anyway was because the school authorities took a certain certain kinds of actions, right? They decided that if you were going to go to a particular school that, you know, they would zone the school in a particular way, or you would go to a school that was in your neighborhood and your neighborhood was residentially segregated. Um, they would build schools to make sure that there would be a white school and there would be a black school. But there was no law requiring it, there were no signs requiring it. And so the question became uh if this if this is really like Jim Crow, does this violate Brown versus Board of Education? And in fact, that's really what this Millican versus Bradley case was all about.

Donna Givens Davidson 7:30

Yes, but one more question before we get to Aaron. In Detroit, you had pastors, um, leading um community leaders who were opposing school desegregation, school integration.

SPEAKER_06 7:43

Yeah, so um we had someone who we we will talk about in common, uh, Albert Clegg, who um was a passionate Detroiter, uh, a preacher, uh, a black nationalist, uh, and someone who was deeply interested in educating black youth. Um and for a while he worked with the NAACP until he became convinced that the NAACP wasn't doing enough to really take care of black children. And what he really wanted was for black parents to take over black schools, right? He he got to the point where he just didn't think that there was any role or that there should be any role at all for white folks in the schools in Detroit. And so one of the things he was trying to do was wrest control or take control back away from uh the white leaders of the school district at that time. Um and so that we'll leave it there for a moment and then we can we can talk about sort of more historic.

Donna Givens Davidson 8:36

That um Detroiters had a lot of pride and a lot of feelings that we should own things and was very different because we have more resources in many instances than people in the South who were fighting for school desegregation, who didn't really have the access to schools as we have them here. Is that true?

SPEAKER_06 8:50

Um, I think that um, you know, my research suggests that you know Detroiters were passionate about education. Black Detroiters, like my like my family, my parents were passionate about education, and there were many black families that felt that the Detroit School District was under-educating their kids. And so the question was what to do about it. And there were different views about that. Uh uh and Clegg was somebody who was at the forefront of this of this question.

unknown 9:15

Okay.

Orlando Bailey 9:16

Aaron, we we we definitely want to hear from you as well. Situate your Detroit story with the story that you tell uh in The Black Utopians and how you arrived uh to the number one, the scholarship that you expouse, the history that you want to tell, and the the infusion of, and Michelle, you you do this too, and I'm really interested to hear from both of you on this, the infusion of your personal narrative. It also reads memoir-like, and that's a deliberate choice, right? And so talk about that.

SPEAKER_04 9:50

Yeah, right. So The Black Utopians is really a book about the broad history of kind of black social dreaming, um, really from the period right after the uh you know civil war when black towns and sort of freedom colonies were being created throughout the country. Um so it starts there and it traces through much of the uh 20th century. Um, and a big part of the story is about the shrine of the Black Madonna, which uh you know is a church that is still here. Um but in the 60s and 70s it was a black nationalist hub. Um it was really uh a sort of you know center of activism in the city, but it was also a part of the black counterculture of that period. Um you know, I grew up going to many different kinds of churches. I grew up, you know, Baptist, uh, but many of the institutions, uh the churches that I went through were not necessarily politically engaged. Um, I learned about the shrine, and it was a very, very different kind of church. Um, it, you know, Reverend Clegg, who led it, uh, was known in the 60s for his work as an you know, education um uh advocate, but he was also known as kind of the architect of what some people call black liberation theology, which essentially is saying, you know, how how can we make Christianity and r religion in general uh speak not only to the spiritual and psychological needs of people, but also to their material needs. Um, what was fascinating to me is that the shrine was not just a church, it actually modeled many different kinds of utopian experiments. So one example was their children's institution, which they called Mtoto House. And it was uh essentially a black children's commune right in the heart of Detroit that was modeled after the Israeli kibbutzim, Cuban liberation schools, you know, Soviet Union kindergartens. And when I learned about this, I I you know was shocked that this kind of experiment existed in Detroit. So it uses the shrine to tell a broader story about what it um what it means to sort of be a black utopian you know thinker and and dreamer.

Orlando Bailey 12:16

Yeah, yeah, but you you also you also sits situate your family story and your dad and everything that he went through within the narrative. Uh tell us why tell us why you chose to do that.

SPEAKER_04 12:31

Yeah, my my father is a part of the story, and uh, you know, because he he was incarcerated from the time I was um eight until I went off to college, you know. Um, and although in many ways our lives were quite different, uh I think we were both obsessed with alternatives, you know. What if our lives uh what if we had been raised under different conditions, you know? Um where were the parts of our lives that could have, you know, forked off uh into something, you know, like very different. And that I think that that question of what what life could have been is really at the center of any utopian longing. Um I felt it was important to write not only about it could have been it could be. Yes, exactly. And I wanted to write not only about black communal movements across time, but also black individual dreaming. Um, you know, what uh what is it about our lives that we kind of hope for? Um, what are the the dreams that we hold on to, and what are those that we are sort of forced to let go of because of what happens in our lives. So it was very important to weave together the individual and communal stories. I love that.

Orlando Bailey 13:50

It's it's it's definitely it's definitely a choice that I'm seeing even journalists and other uh scholars and historians take. And I I I love that. I I love that it's becoming a bold stance that we are writing ourselves because it means something to write your father into the world.

unknown 14:11

Right.

Orlando Bailey 14:11

It means something to write your family into the world. You start your book writing your dad and doting on your dad and your book, and that's also a choice. You wrote them into the world.

SPEAKER_06 14:22

Um, I think that's right. I also think that it's a love letter. Yeah. So when I think about history and being involved in in legal history and sort of all the things that I've been able to achieve in my in my life and in my career, every single thing that I've done has been because somebody else who I didn't know made it possible for me to walk through a door. And so when I looked back to write this story about Millican versus Bradley, it was yes, I wanted to be able to pivot and talk to a general interest audience and be able to bring some of the skills of translation that I use in my constitutional law classroom to talk about the Equal Protection Clause and the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments and Brown Burst's Board of Education. But I also wanted to be able to say that this was a baton, and I'd picked up a baton, and I wanted to look back as we look forward. And so my parents' experiences were a deep part of that, and they sort of they shaped who I am. And in doing that, we also can then open up and have a conversation about Reverend Clegg, and you can look at uh Remus Robinson, and you can look at Nate Jones, and you can look at uh Roy Wilkins and you can look at um a variety of other characters in my book, and all of them are are living people, um people who made choices under conditions of constraint, people who made choices that sometimes we look back and we say, Well, would we have done the same thing? Do we like this? Do we not like this? What would we have done? And so all of that creates, I think, a rich tapestry of living history, and it also allows us to be able to turn around and say thank you.

Donna Givens Davidson 15:54

One of the things I really enjoyed about your book is the way that you platformed your father's philosophy. And so he was not just get shown, but you chose to show a father who was incarcerated, and a lot of times people hide that. And Orlando speaks about that a lot. So I just want to also acknowledge the fact that you chose to acknowledge and to bring I'm I I hate to say humanize because of course he's human, but to out to to showcase his humanity, to showcase his philosophy and the brilliance that helped shape who you are. And a lot of times that story gets hidden. Can you talk about um how your father influenced your thinking?

SPEAKER_04 16:30

Yeah, you know, when he was in prison, uh, we spent years writing letters to one another. Um, and I recall, you know, thinking as a kid that he was a he was a really great writer. Um uh he was a really good storyteller. And um, you know, I our relationship to this day is very complicated. Uh but you know, I wanted him to be a part of this book. Um and I, you know, I wanted him to sort of talk about the life that he had envisioned for himself, the life that he he actually had, you know, and what his what his dreams were for himself and for his family once he was free, you know. Uh and so I I I think a part of a part of the book and a part of my my understanding of utopia is that it it is really not it's not a goal that we reach, it's kind of a process. It describes an ongoing relationship between people, you know, who are attempting to uh perfect or make their relationships better. Um and the process is ongoing, and so the book, you know, it doesn't really end with a story of completion. I mean, the shrine of the black Madonna and its movement, which was called Black Christian Nationalism, you know, it had really ambitious dreams for uh it wanted to achieve the earthly liberation of black people everywhere, you know, through political programming, through uh through education, through land ownership. Uh, but also a really important part of Clegg's philosophy um was that before we achieve material freedom, we have to psychologically get free too. You know, we have to over we have to to um try to live in a way that you know our our parents and grandparents could not have imagined. Um and so yeah, it's it's a messy long process, and that's what I wanted to highlight with the story of my father and the the story of a movement that was actually trying to um sustain itself over decades.

Donna Givens Davidson 18:45

Michelle, in your book, one of the judges um invokes the term apartheid to discuss, describe um segregation. And it kind of took me back to Jonathan Kozal's book, um, The Shame of the Nation, Apartheid in American Schools, or something like that. Um, because we don't always use that kind of language, but in in looking at data right now, it seems as though we haven't changed as much as we might think we should have, or um as much as certainly some of the judges predicted we would have by now. What are your thoughts on that language and that framing?

SPEAKER_06 19:18

Um Well, I guess I have two answers to that. One question is sort of how to think about it then, and the question is how to think about it now. Um you know, I I would be comfortable using that phraseology, and I think I did a little bit a while ago in terms of thinking about what we did. We I mean, I think we feel more comfortable using the phrase Jim Crow, right? But I think the problem with Jim Crow is that phrase is that it's partial and it leaves out what was happening in the rest of the country. And so you could say that we had a nationwide system of apartheid, and that that system had different regional variations. Um and that's sort of the way that I think about it. Um does that mean it was always the same in every state and in and every situation? No, it wasn't. Um but what I think it does mean is that we we had a very strong and deep commitment to race discrimination and white supremacy in this country for a very long period of time. Um and the pro and the and when I enter the story, when I'm born in 1963, and when my parents are here, we're we are in the the latter stages of trying to get rid of the formal um uh ramaments, shall we say, of the the form the formalities of of Jim Crow, right? So my parents are really that last generation where Jim Crow is just legal. Um and so very much my book is about sort of what happens as we're transitioning to what the what's closer to what we have today, right? Um you know, with respect to today, I think that you know, I earlier today I was talking about the book, and I was saying that we go that our country has gone through a series of historic cycles. Um and I think I sort of see our country going through a cycle right now, and it's a cycle that I think is, for instance, if we think about the Supreme Court, it's a very, very, very conservative, if not reactionary, Supreme Court. Um and that's cyclic because we haven't, you know, we we had a Warren Court, we had a more liberal court. Um and so, you know, I the I guess the question is have have we moved, have we improved, are things better? I think the answer is yes, they are, right? I think I think they are better now. Um I think the concern though is that we're going through a cycle, and and in a cycle, what you can do is you can backslide, and there's backlash. Um uh and so we can talk more about sort of exactly what happened in the late 60s, early 1970s. Um uh I think I think there's a significant difference in in terms of sort of the the way that the way that uh uh government behaves relative to the way that it behaved in the 1960s and early 1970s. Um but there's no question we're going through we're going through a uh a very difficult cycle right now.

Orlando Bailey 21:52

I I I I want I want to stick there for a a few minutes because um what you're describing. Is the backlash after perceived periods of progressive movement and progression, right? We saw it after Reconstruction. We saw it after the civil rights movement and the ushering in of different acts and laws that criminalize Black life and Black behavior. I think the central theme, though, in both of your, one of the central themes in both of the books is this idea of hope and aspiration for something better and the pursuit of that, whether it's a promised land or a utopic society or whether it's through legal litigation and challenge. Can you talk a little bit about the tension of black optimism, right? Being optimistic in a time where the reality is everything but that, right? And how folks sort of trudge along through the rugged terrains of whatever that precarity and current condition is.

SPEAKER_04 23:14

Yeah, you know, in calling the book the Black Utopians, I knew that that would sort of uh spark a particular kind of response, you know. Um I think I was interested in writing about utopianism, not as kind of blind optimism, but actually when I describe black utopianism, I mean uh responses to conditions of disenfranchisement, of disinheritance, you know, it's people who know exactly what they are building from, which so often is you know deprivation and lack. Um with Reverend Clegg in particular, he did not like the word utopian. He actually identified as a pragmatic realist, you know. In other words, he was interested in, yes, he was a Christian minister, but he also knew that you couldn't do this alone. You know, the the task of black liberation um required alliances with people of different political and religious backgrounds, you know. Um he was interested in having a movement that responded to the time that he was in, right? And so in the late 60s, the shrine of Black Madonna looked, you know, very much like a sort of you know typical black nationalist, you know, institution. In the 70s, it it became more Pan-African, kind of expanding its vision to the rest of the world. But you also had this point in the late 70s and 80s where uh Clegg was looking around him and sort of seeing that the role of the black church in social change had had shifted. You know, it might not have been as central as it once was. What were people going to, if not the church? Well, some people were going to um to yoga, to transcendental, you know, meditation. They were engaging with other philosophies, and so the shrine began to resemble a lot of that. It began to sort of embrace a lot of the the you know tenets of the consciousness uh awakening movement, right? So that is um uh to go back, you know, to your question about optimism, it's really about adapting with the times and sort of taking bits and pieces from what's around you in order to achieve a specific goal.

Donna Givens Davidson 25:44

I want to talk, take a minute though, to talk about the transcendental um quality in that movement because that was actually introduced by one of the women in the church. And a lot of times those stories get buried and it's all him. Can you talk about her a little bit?

SPEAKER_04 25:57

Yes, so one of the um the person who got me really into this story is a woman named Shelly McIntosh. Um, she's an amazing person. She was the kind of one of the architects of that children's institution that I mentioned, uh, but she was also a um she was an uh educator, a yoga practitioner. Um she sort of led a lot of the shrines, um, you know, movements towards like new age philosophies in the 70s and 80s. Um the role of women in the church was a really uh prominent one because uh you know there was a a lot of um debate about whether you know the shrine was uh a patriarchal institution or not. Um but yes, exactly. It was very important for women to have leadership roles in the church. You know, Shelley McIntosh was one of the the sort of main supporters um of Reverend Clay. So I I did want to explore that story. Um and there were you know many others that we could talk about as well.

Donna Givens Davidson 27:14

That's the interesting thing about patriarchy, though, right? There's always women doing stuff in patriarchal movements. Men know they need women to make things happen in a lot of instances, but women don't always get recorded in history. And so I like to always bring it out because it they're significant to me.

SPEAKER_04 27:31

Absolutely. One of the stories that was really great to explore is the the story of Rose Walden, who was the model for so as soon as you walk into the shrine of Black Madonna, it's called that because you see this 18-foot-tall by nine-foot-wide mural of a black Madonna and child, which was unveiled in 1967. It's still the striking image. Like you all can go, you know, to the shrine and still see it. Um, but the the story of Rose herself, who was the model, you know, that was not told really. Um, and so I was able to speak to her for the book, and you know, she sh was a young mother who had, you know, a uh uh three-year-old kid when she was approached in front of a laundromat, and you know, to to to be a model. She did not uh think of herself that way. She had a really difficult upbringing, um, but she agreed to be a part of this. And when she saw the mural, you know, uh for the first time, I think it it transformed the way that she understood herself. One of the the most you know striking parts about writing the book and speaking to Rose was hearing when she saw this mural, instead of you know uh thinking about herself, she thought of a farm. You know, what she said is that it brought to mind the landscape of a farm, of something that could, you know, uh nourish and sustain people. And to this day, that mural is an important visual symbol of what the shrine stands for, kind of inspired, you know, generations of black people to believe that they could be something more than what they had been told by the rest of the world, really.

Donna Givens Davidson 29:18

Michelle, you followed your father into a legal career. I did. How did he influence your thinking? How did he help shape who you are?

SPEAKER_06 29:27

I was actually trying to think about how did he not. Um you know, I mean, I I remember you know to have he he was a huge influence in my life. Um I looked up to him tremendously. Uh at a certain point it became clear to me that it was not typical to to to have a black lawyer, right? That it was just an unusual situation. Um really bright, really funny, um and uh optimistic. Both of my parents were optimists. Uh uh, and I think that's that's been a carryover to me, right? Which is that I think that they their life experience was that um they had seen things get better. Um and that was something that they imbued they imbued in us. But the idea I think from my father was that you could go out into the world and you could make people's lives better. And so he he represented three generations of black Detroiters, right? And all different kinds of primarily criminal matters, but some civil matters as where as well. Um and so it it was something that I knew that I could be. Um and so that he just I just had a huge influence on me in my life.

Orlando Bailey 30:40

Can you can you talk um about uh this optimism and this aspiration? I mean, the the book also sort of situates uh spatial racism uh ed in education and equity next to each other without it being like a specified policy. This is the argument of the Supreme Court, is like, well, there's no policy that there's no law that is saying like this is a thing, right? Um your your parents ended up figuring out how to buy land, which was a fascinating story. Mate, I'm gonna let you tell that story, yeah. And then, you know, and if you can't riff a little bit on how spatial racism and education and equity go hand in hand.

SPEAKER_06 31:28

Yeah, so let me do let me do three things. One is to tell the story. So I grew up hearing the story about how we came to live in Palmer Woods. Um, and the story went something like this that, you know, my parents had gotten married, and this was like they wanted to build their dream home, uh, and they had their eye, they they they had their eye on Palmer Woods uh and they wanted to buy some land there, but they couldn't buy land there. Right? This is before the Fair Housing Act came into being in 1968, this is before 1968. Perfectly legal to discriminate in the basis of race in housing transactions, right? You want if I don't want to sell to you because you're black, that's too bad, right? No law, no law prohibits that. Um, so they basically found an intermediary, a white intermere intermediary, who purchased the land from white owners and then they went ahead and then they bought it from the intermediary. Um and I didn't and I didn't necessarily believe this because my mother, you know, occasionally told stories. And and she embellished, you know, in her very Frederica way. Uh and then I had a buddy of mine went and pulled the warranty deed. Uh and so I actually cited in the book. And you can see directly that there's a transaction that's made. This is literally months before the Fair Housing Act uh is passed, which is a whole nother story because you wouldn't have the Federal Fair Housing Act if it hadn't been uh if if Dr. King had not been murdered, um, which I also talk about in the book. Um but you can see basically what happened there. And so, you know, that was that was something that sort of became concrete to me. But the other piece of it that you were also asking about was sort of spatial and education. My book is a housing book, it's also an education book. And the reason that those two things come together is because when you're talking about sort of do we have a nationwide system of apartheid and we had different regional variations. In this city, we had a case that was brought in 1970, and it was brought not necessarily at the behest of Clay. Clegg had sort of gotten the ball rolling, and it was brought by the Detroit branch of the NAACP. Um, and what basically they were saying was that the school authorities, both state and local, were running a separate and unequal school system here in the city of Detroit. Um, cases like that had been brought in cities and towns where there wasn't a law that said that you have to separate students on the basis of race. And sometimes the school authorities won, and they won using the following defense. Well, we just have a neighborhood school rule here. So if you live in a certain neighborhood, then you have to go to this school. Um, and so we didn't do anything, we didn't violate the constitution, we didn't, we, you know, everybody just wants to go to their neighborhood school. Uh, and that was an argument that worked. And so what they did here in Detroit is they said, you know what, we want to take that argument away from the defendants. We want to take that argument away from the school authorities. And here's how we're gonna do it. We're gonna show both that they set they segregated students in different schools on the basis of race because they actually were sort of pulling strings and they had a different student assignment plan and they let white students transfer out of black schools, et cetera, et cetera. But we're also gonna show the underlying residential segregation that made it impossible for black folks to move out of certain areas of the city so that once you're sitting in a neighborhood, you can't leave. So then if the school authorities come forward and say, Well, we're just gonna, you're just gonna go to your neighborhood school, they're effectively incorporating the underlying residential segregation directly into the school system, mainlining it right right into the veins of the school school system. And so it was this nexus between school segregation and housing segregation that the lawyers in the Detroit case knew that they had to get at if they wanted to make sure they were going to win the case. And the reason why the Milliken case, many one of the many reasons why it's so interesting, is that we had a we had a case, we had a trial right down in Detroit, downtown, in Judge Stephen Roth's courtroom, and it was a 41-day trial, right? It's a pretty long trial. Um, but 10 days, and this is a school segregation trial, but 10 days of the 41 days are about housing segregation. So you're getting testimony about redlining, you're getting testimony about the segregation wall on eight mile, you're you're getting testimony about racially restrictive covenants, you're getting testimony about um uh title companies in the city of Detroit that are still reporting racially restrictive covenants in the titles even after 1970, uh even after 1968 in the Fair Housing Act. You're getting testimony about two separate uh racially separate brokers associations. There were black brokers and white realtors, and this was up to 1970. And so all of this evidence is coming in as well. And so the spatial piece and the ha and the school piece go hand in hand, right? It's peanut butter and jelly.

Donna Givens Davidson 36:21

It seems not no, I was gonna say it seems like one of the big arguments or one of the big debates in the book is about de jure versus de facto segregation. Yes. And um this idea that some people have the segregation just happens. And um some of the um judges would say there is no such thing really as de facto, that it's all de jure, that there's really no distinction. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_06 36:46

Yeah, so let's let's let's define our terms, right? De jure de jure means tonight. Yeah, let's define our terms. De jure just means by law. So you close your eyes and you think about the water fountain, you think about Southern Jim Crow, that's de jure, right? In those kind of cases, there's not the the lawyers don't have to prove that there's de jure because they just point at the state law, they point at the city ordinance, right? The question is whether that in and of itself violates the constitution. That's the question. But once you decide that it violates the constitution, what do you do in other areas where there was no law requiring the schools to be separate? That's called de facto, right? There's de jure de facto. And the Supreme Court basically had this false idea that if it if a law didn't require require it, then there was no such thing as by law segregation, right? So what happens though is that when the school authorities take action with an intent to segregate the schools, when they let white students transfer out of black schools because they don't want to go to school with black kids, when they build schools in the center of black neighborhoods and in the center of white neighborhoods solely for those particular populations, they're doing that with an intent to segregate. And that is the same thing as de jour.

SPEAKER_07 38:03

Right, right.

SPEAKER_06 38:04

Right? But the problem is, or the challenges for the lawyer is that the lawyer's got to prove it. Right? They've got to prove that the reason why the schools are racially identifiable is because the school authorities wanted to make them that way. And so that's that's the difference between the two.

Donna Givens Davidson 38:19

But the art housing argument also pointed out that housing segregation was intentional, and that you could prove housing segregation was intentional, and it's sort of like it feels like you know it's done, and then when it's no longer legal, they say, My bad.

SPEAKER_06 38:31

Yeah, but the consequences are still here. Well, here's the problem though. The housing the housing segregation was intentional, but the school authorities said, but we're not responsible for that. We didn't buy and sell houses. We we didn't engage in redlining, we didn't put up public housing, right? We aren't we aren't the brokers' association. That's the problem. And that's the central difficulty of the Milliken case, because at a certain level, if you're gonna say, well, we're incorporating it, you could still say, well, you know, these particular governmental people aren't the right government. You didn't sue the right people.

Donna Givens Davidson 39:04

But you know, but it's almost as though it was framed as though we're punishing schools and not advancing the interests of students. And so we're not gonna punish this school district for harm, even though that should not be the point of the case. It should be that we are doing things to, you know, give equal opportunity to children who are harmed by these laws or policies, right? Well, that is the point, right?

SPEAKER_06 39:23

The point is, are you who are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the black plaintiffs or are you focusing on the mostly white defendants, right? And that's the central tension. That's the central tension. It's where should we, where how should the law care about these people? Should the law care about these people? And who in in a contest between the two, who's going to win? Um and the point was in the Millican case to get the court over the hump of recognizing that whether you were a black child living in Detroit or a black child living in Louisiana, you had the same right to go to an integrated school, right? Um and the Constitution should protect children, whether they're living in, you know, North Carolina uh or North Dakota. And that that was really the the issue, and that was what uh the lawyers here in Detroit were able to get uh a very reluctant uh federal judge to be able to see. Go ahead, Aaron.

SPEAKER_04 40:26

Yeah, just to respond to Michelle, you know, it reading her book, which you all should by the way, it's it's an amazing sort of legal thriller, it's really incredible, but you kind of understand why black nationalism in Detroit was so particularly strong, what it developed out of, you know. Um because Reverend Clegg saw what was happening with housing and schooling, you know, segregation. And one thing that I try to explain is, you know, black black utopians who wanted to create their own institutions, right? Like they weren't creating these just because it was fun, right? Uh Clegg said, we aren't, you know, making sort of like hippie communes, right? We are actually creating these because um people have shown us that uh they you know they don't want to live next to black people, right? They uh uh we we have been placed in uh neighborhoods, we have been placed in schooling districts that are that are separate, that are legally you know separated, that and and so it's out of this condition of you know separateness, of enforced alienation that we are going to create our own institutions, not necessarily because uh we want to, but because we need to, you know, and that I think is where you see the the these sort of remnants or afterlives of black nationalism now, you know. It's it's uh it doesn't exist in the same form necessarily like as it did in the 60s and 70s, but that impulse to you know sort of look at the world around us, see the ways that that it's on fire and say we need to build our own institutions.

Donna Givens Davidson 42:17

I would say it is part of Detroit's culture even now. Yes, there's a certain perspective, Detroit, like we want to keep Detroit Detroit. Yeah, and that speaks to that nationalistic impulse that if we don't keep Detroit Detroit, if we desegregate too much or have too many other people come in, then we will lose our power.

SPEAKER_06 42:34

Well, this is this is this is where our books are in conversation, right? Because this is this is the core of it, and I felt like in order for me to write this legal story, I had to also write a story that looked at the sort of the cross currents of black political thought. Um that I couldn't I couldn't just put, you know, this this brief was filed and that brief was filed. No, no, no, no, no. We're not gonna do it like that. What we're gonna do is we're gonna tell the full story uh in all of it in all of its flowering. And that means that there were significant and very strong um disagreements in the black community about how to achieve black freedom and how to achieve black equality, right? Um, you know, I did not grow up in a nationalist home, and and that's just that's just was not what happened, right? You asked me about Bernard, and that was part of Bernard, and that was part of that was part of Frederica. But what I came to realize in the research and the writing of the book was tremendous respect um uh for Reverend Clegg, even while I decided I began not disagreeing, I began in a place of not agreeing with him, and I ended in a place of not agreeing with him. But the but it was a journey. You allow yourself to him. Yeah, and I allowed myself to go to understand that. And what I also allowed myself to understand about him, um, and sort of getting into his biography is imagine what it would feel like. He was brilliant. And one of the things he wanted more than anything was to be a journalist, right? So he gets to Oberlin, he gets three, you know, these crazy high grades, and he just wants to be, you know, on the school newspaper, and he can't be on the school. School newspaper. Right. And so one of the things that this reminds us about just of the various kinds of harms associated with our various regional variations of Jim Crow or American apartheid or whatever you want to call it is how incredibly psychically wounding that is. And different people respond to those wounds in different ways. And so everything that Callague did, including sort of getting kicking off this decentralization move here in the city of Detroit, I think came out of the experiences that he had. My parents had different experiences, but they were different people and they reacted in different ways. None was better. It was just different.

Orlando Bailey 44:53

If you haven't read them, I encourage you to read it. But the the way that you all tell stories, especially about times that you didn't live in, that you didn't live in, that I didn't live in, it it still puts me right there. I feel like my blood remembers, my bloodline remembers a time that I was not in. And then I'm able to sort of piece it together with my own life experience, like a plug and play. I remember uh how power, even still, how the remnants of power that the shrine still had in the 1990s, especially yielding black political power with the black slate and all of that. But I I I want us to stick with this tension a little bit around um taking care of what we have. This is the community that we're in. We're gonna we're gonna we're gonna make it a utopia. And the way that my grandmother talks about these communities to me, she used to talk about these communities to me, it felt like, oh my god, this is what a what a time to be alive. And then for folks, for other black folks to have aspirations to leave this space and to go integrate somewhere else. What and and the tension that that caused and the fracture that it caused, whether it was a legal challenge, whether it was going to another neighborhood where we were not in, whether it was going to Roper instead of McKenzie, or you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_04 46:21

Yeah, I mean, you know, I I I think both of our stories in some way are about staying or leaving, right? You know, um, there are those who are forced to stay in a certain place, um, or those who want to, you know, and want to sort of use use the place they are in as kind of the basis of their that you know, their freedom work, you know, so to put. Um, but like with you know, with the shrine of the Black Madonna and with Reverend Clegg, um you know, I I think he was someone who could have easily left and gone somewhere else. He grew up in a in a very affluent, you know, family. His dad was a prominent black doctor uh in the city. Um, you know, they they were well off. Uh uh, but there was a point in the 60s, uh really beginning in the early 60s, where you know, one thing that people don't know so much about Clegg is that he he actually for a while believed in integration. He he he served at a church in San Francisco, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, which was run by the the pastor um Howard Thurman. That was the church after World War II that that was sort of the um the kind of interracial, you know, anti-fascist church, right? We can bring white and black people together. Um and Clegg served there for about six months, you know. Um, but it was, you know, around the time of the March on Washington, um, where he was seeing that mainstream, you know, um uh civil rights groups were not really responding to the material conditions of most people's black lives, that he he began to to break away from that dream.

Donna Givens Davidson 48:11

I was gonna say he left too.

SPEAKER_04 48:12

Yeah, yes.

Donna Givens Davidson 48:13

He left where he came from.

SPEAKER_04 48:15

Exactly.

Donna Givens Davidson 48:15

And he traveled to black nationalism. He didn't come from a black nationalistic household. Right. And he actually changed his name to Jerem Oji. He didn't even go by the name Dr. Albert Clegg. Yes. Um, and that's how he became known. So I think there's the leaving. Sometimes you leave the place that you when you leave, it's it's his utopia was leaving, you know, sort of black elitism and moving into a black community that was more focused on black nationalism. I think it's important to point that out. And I think it's also important to point out that the legacy of the black slate kind of created a um institutional response to all of these problems that you identify because now all of a sudden you're building black power and you have an instrument to you know really help direct how people are going to come into spaces and lead us for at least um two or three decades.

SPEAKER_04 49:06

Yeah, and just to explain, the black slate is this uh essentially you know uh political lobbying organization that uh grew out of a lot of the work that was happening at the shrine of the Black Madonna. It um sort of has helped elect you know generations of black leaders on you know education boards. They may kind of helped yes elect Mayor Young. Um and so there was a real investment um in you know building institutions here in the city. But of course, the other part of any utopian longing is that question of like, what happens if I go elsewhere? You know, what happens if I leave? And I and I think even back in 2020, we were seeing in small pockets that there were black Americans who were asking, well, like should I go somewhere else? Like, is it is is life here in the U.S. you know tenable? It's a question that I I think people are still asking.

Donna Givens Davidson 50:06

Um but yeah, that's the Return to Ghana movement is an example of that, yes.

Orlando Bailey 50:12

Yes. Um go ahead, Michelle. You'll get the last word before you go to the audience.

SPEAKER_06 50:16

Yeah. I despise segregation. I just do. I despise Jim Crow. Um I'm a lawyer, I'm a constitutional law girl. Um, and I think that um every I I come to this project from that perspective, and uh, and I don't think that that changed. Um segregation was used segregation was a tool to perpetuate white supremacy. Um and you know, it was really it was useful. It it got the job done. Um it allowed for uh black folks to be to be concentrated and for and for all kinds of wealth to be plundered and to be expropriated, for folks to be undereducated. So so I think that you know there's two we're talking about two different things. One thing is sort of where do we ch how do we choose, who with whom do we choose to to um join in community? With whom do we identify? How with whom do with whom do we want to live culturally and intimately? And that is a different question than the question of state mandated segregation. And and state mandated segregation had to be destroyed, whether it was the southern variation or the northern variation. Um and that and that is something that you know I I just have never wavered on that. And um when you destroy it, it then raises significant questions about what people can then choose to do and whether they decide to go, whether they decide to stay. But that is a second-order um, that is the fruits of success. Um uh and and success can sometimes be painful. Yeah, I would just point out.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:07

You know, I I just want to point out that in 2026, not everybody has the choice.

SPEAKER_07 52:13

Yeah.

Donna Givens Davidson 52:13

People who are more educated, people who are um given certain privileges have more choices. And one of the challenges, I think, around segregation is the concentration of people who have fewer choices and therefore are more politically vulnerable. Um, if we're going to desegregate, we have to figure out how to desegregate everybody so nobody is left behind. And we haven't figured out how to do that yet.

SPEAKER_06 52:36

That's undoubtedly true. That's undoubtedly true. For my focus in this book, I was looking at a different period in time. I was looking at a at the time that came before this time. Right. Right? And sort of that, and I think that there are clues and hints in that conversation in that story that help us understand why the world looks the way it looks today. Um, but I do think that um it's you know trying going through the process of eradicating uh uh segregation that had that had been legalized in this country, depending on how you count it, back to 1896, 1888, uh, then the the process of disenfranchising blacks and not allowing them to be able to vote, the whole that whole process had to be unwound.

Donna Givens Davidson 53:22

No, absolutely. I'm just saying, yeah. The Detroit public schools are as segregated today as they were then. We've made progress because people are in the suburbs, but if you look at the racial concentration of black students in Detroit public schools, most students have not had the opportunity to access some of the benefits. And so I think it's an unfinished job of desegregation. And it's not anti-desegregation. I just think the job is unfinished until everybody has a choice.

SPEAKER_06 53:47

Yeah, I agree. And and I'd like to believe that if the mil if the Millican versus Bradley lawsuit had gone 5'4 in the other direction, that maybe I don't I you know, I don't think that everything would have been different, but at least one thing would have been different.

Donna Givens Davidson 54:02

But you look at those places where busting did happen and you saw more progress.

SPEAKER_06 54:05

When you saw or desegregation did happen in like Charlotte and places like Yeah, I mean what what we saw empirically um sort of during the height of when we were going through court-ordered desegregation were two different things. Number one, we had heightened black uh academic achievement, right? And a lot of that had to do with just the sort of good old-fashioned green follows white, black folks being black students being uh having access to more teachers and um longer school day and the all the other stuff that goes with that. Um uh the other piece of it was that we had some very positive benefits when it came to white students too. Um and so one of the reasons why I became such a passionate advocate of integration is because I'm a small D Democrat, which is that we need to maintain we for me, speaking as myself now, um we need to maintain the American the American experiment, right? And it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where we can maintain the American experiment for the very reasons that you just said, which is that is that is that raising children in uh under conditions of equality, uh uh across the level of diversity, racial class, and every and in every other way together is the is the best way I think we have to be able to ensure that our democracy continues.

Orlando Bailey 55:27

Okay, I gotta jump in. I'm out of practice. I used to know how to jump in, and I've not been on the podcast in a long time. Listen, we uh want to bring the audience in on this conversation. We have two uh microphones. There is a microphone here, there is a microphone there. Uh we have about 15 minutes for an audience Q ⁇ A before we transition to uh the book signing and the photographs and all of that. So if you have a question for Michelle, first off, let's give Michelle and Aaron an amazing round of applause. But if you have a question, come on down. Let's let's try to get as many in as we can. We want to bring you into the conversation. Don't be shy. We need you to use the microphone. I know some of you are like, I can stay where I am, I can speak loud enough, but we're recording this for the podcast, and so we need you on the microphone. All right. Don't try to take the mic from Lance. Don't we got the microphones? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 56:32

So don't take it.

Orlando Bailey 56:33

Don't take it.

SPEAKER_01 56:35

Holding it. He's holding it. Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Um, so I know y'all kind of touched on um Michelle. You said you're vehemently against uh segregation. Do you feel like uh segregation? Like do you feel like it was received well like like black students going into these white schools? Because I am a social worker, I work in the school system uh at Roseville Community Schools, and it's often that I see the racism, but it's not overt, it's covert, right? And so that's kind of where I kind of have that problem is there's not enough black staff to relate to the kids, and the white teachers don't really understand how to engage with black students oftentimes, and so uh that disparity is kind of where I question is segregation really how we should be going, or should we have black institutions that are for us, by us, in our communities instead, right? Should we empower uh DPS schools and and put more resources there, or do we try to continue to try to fit segregate, you know, try to integrate and fit ourselves into spaces where we're not widely accepted as we are who we are.

SPEAKER_06 58:02

So a couple different things there. So when we talk about segregation, I'm talking about state-mandated segregation, right? So my book is about state-mandated segregation. The government is deciding who's going to go to school with whom. That violates the Constitution and it had to end. Um and so that that is that's what I'm talking about, right? So that so that's we want to just get that piece out. The second piece is should we put more um uh emphasis into our community? Should we put more resources into the community? I I don't necessarily view these things as being mutually exclusive, but all of it comes down to money, and all of it comes down to political power. Um, and so when we talk about put more resources in, that's great, right? Um, but we still exist as a as a minority, um, although now it's sort of it's a much more it's a more complicated scenario than we had in say 1968 in terms in terms of sort of um the the racial breakdown of our country now. It's much more multiracial, right? But the money and the resources and the training and all of that have to come from somewhere, right? And so the question becomes do we think we're gonna be able to get all access to all of the different kinds of resources we need through the political system that we currently have? Um I think we have to continue to try. Um but but I don't think that there's that either or is going to be a panacea. I think you want to do both and, right? And I think I think what you want to do is you want to be completely and utterly committed to the education of black children uh under under conditions of equality wherever that can happen. Um and so and so I've always resisted that binary. Um uh and and I've also think back to some of the folks who were why they got interested, why why the black folks got interested in these cases in 1970, right? And a lot of them said, well, I wanted to make sure that my kid had resources, and I knew that if there were white students around, they would get them, they would get the resources, right? So so that that is out there. Um uh and so you know, I I have my own sort of beliefs around sort of what I want to see our country become, and I think that it's hard to imagine our country if every if all children are are educated in silos, even if they're educated well in silos, and then they start getting to know each other when they're 25, is that a recipe for success for democracy? I have a big question about that.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:00:33

Would you say that accountability has to accompany desegregation? What do you mean by accountability? That accountability in these school districts that continue to practice racism inside the school districts because you have segregation happening inside of majority white districts where black students attend, where they're put in different classes, you have over punishment. I think that's what you're speaking to.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:51

Absolutely. Absolutely. One of the things that that's and this is not new, right?

SPEAKER_06 1:00:56

So the in 1972, before everything started to unravel, we had a we had a preliminary metropolitan desegregation plan that would have affected about 50 suburban school districts with the district of with the Detroit School District. Um and the and the plan that was quite preliminary that was never put into place was concerned about things like tracking. It was concerned about things like making sure that all the black teachers didn't get fired when when we when we transitioned to this. These were these were issues, these were issues that were that were identified then. They continue to be issues. They continue to be issues. I guess what I just push back on is the idea that you know if we just sort of go one way or the other, that we're that suddenly things are gonna be okay. There they will continue to be issues as race will always continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future, but we've got to continue to meet it and move forward.

Orlando Bailey 1:01:44

All right, I'll just add to add one thing to that real quick. Go ahead, Aaron, but I want to make sure that if other folks have questions, that y'all just come down to the microphones and we'll get to you. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:53

Yeah, there is you know something about black separatism that is kind of inherently tragic in a sense. And and the the like there's a story I tell in the book that relates to this desegregation plan that was happening in Detroit in like 1970. Um the current founder, or sorry, the the current leader of the shrine of the Black Madonna, um, a man named Kamathi Nelson was a high schooler who was bussed to um to Osbourne High School. And um this was uh you know a small group of black students really who were being bussed. Um and there was a lot of protests from um a group of white parents and students, and you know, high schools in Detroit at that time were racial battlegrounds. You know, there were really the uh you know um protests and kind of like many riots that happened around the city because of this plan. Um it was Kamathi's experience at Osborne High being attacked by by white parents, uh you know, physically attacked, uh throwing himself over a black girl to protect her from getting kicked, that sent him and a group of his friends to the shrine of the Black Madonna to find some solace, you know. Um, and so it on the one hand, it's beautiful that there were these spaces that were created um to be these kind of safe haven, safe havens and harbors for people like Kamathi when you know uh this plan to you know integrate resulted like in this violence. But also um I think at the end of the day, you know, it it still is kind of a minor tragedy, right? Uh the creation of these all black institutions is I don't know, there's there's there's lightning. Absolutely, absolutely. And so um, yeah, I I I think that question of of whether to create spaces like that are just for us, I you know, I think that's gonna keep happening because it's it's always gonna kind of gonna be necessary. Um the question is whether well, I don't know. I I don't even know what the question is. There are so so many questions that spawned from that.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:04:20

But in utopia. We wouldn't need it, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:23

Yeah, right.

Orlando Bailey 1:04:24

Yeah. Uh we have a question right here.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:27

Um, Professor Adams, um, given the backsliding you described at the Supreme Court, um, what has been your experience teaching constitutional law this year? And uh part two is I want to be an optimist too, but given the recent decisions and the maybe expected decision on birthright citizenship, can you talk us off the ledge?

SPEAKER_06 1:04:52

I have 182 grade uh exams to grade or however many I have to get to grade still. Um so I've been teaching constitutional law for 15 or 20 years. I love it. I love working with young lawyers. Um I love sort of walking them through from the very first day when we talk about Marbury versus Madison, which is the case that basically gave us this idea that we would have a Supreme Court that would have all this power of judicial review. Um, one of the things that's good about uh teaching 200 years of constitutional law is that you realize that there's nothing new under the sun. Um and so the moment we feel this moment so so intensely because we feel it, because we're living in it. Um and then if we if we roll the camera back, we can see that we've been here before. Um we've been here before in Dred Scott, we've been here before in Plessy versus Ferguson, we've been here before in the civil rights cases, uh, we've been here before in a wide variety of cases having to do with race, and I'm just and I'm just focusing on those. Um and so I I think I think this is a very Hard moment. I think Calais is a very hard case. I I think we're gonna win the birthright citizenship case, by the way. Um but you know Calais is a let's put let's go back for just two seconds. We'll do a little bit of constitutional law. Back in 2013, the Supreme Court really began its uh dismantling the Voting Rights Act, right? In a case, in a case called Shelby County, what they did was they said, well, you know, we have this thing called the coverage formula under the Voting Rights Act. And the coverage formula means you guys were the bad guys, right? You were the serial offenders. You were the ones who were who were just habitually making it impossible for black people to vote. And so anytime you want to make a voting change, if you want to move a polling place six inches, you've got to get federal approval to do that. And that's called preclearance. Get the Supreme Court in 2013, and the Supreme say, well, you know, it's not really fair to pick out these groups because you're treating these particular states differently than all the rest of the states, and it violates this principle called equal sovereignty. And so there's not enough recent data as to suggest to support this idea of the coverage formula, so goodbye, coverage formula. If you want to repass it, that's cool, but of course they knew that that that would not happen. Right? So that that cut a huge piece out of the voting rights act. There was another case that kind of went to the went to what's called the section two, but Calais really does this. And so, in effect, and you know, the folks who do more voting rights stuff, I think will maybe correct me on this. In effect, the voting rights act is dead. I think there'll be some ways that you're gonna be able to make some arguments on the on the sides of that. That is huge, right? I mean, that is uh, you know, of the of the majors statutes that were passed. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The Voting Rights Act, I mean, I wouldn't, I mean, uh all three of them are near and dear to my heart, but the Voting Rights Act is one that we know for sure people died specifically to bring us that statute. And it's incredibly difficult and disheartening and upsetting to have the Supreme Court wave it away. Um, um, and so then you might say, well, why are you still an optimist? Um and I wouldn't say that I, you know, I'm I'm passionate about the country. I'm passionate about American citizenship. I'm passionate about uh the idea that black folks are citizens of the United States. And I'm passionate about everyone else here is being a citizen of the United States. And I want this experiment to go forward. Um we we have gone to the bad place before. I hope we won't have to go to such a bad place again. I I'd like to believe this is not 1858.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:08:56

Right? Okay. I think one of the things that gets me excited about these two books is that Aaron um writes about how people took power into their own hands in creating communities and reminds us that while we are waiting for laws to change, people sometimes do things. Can you talk a little bit about the freedom movement? Because I was really fascinated with the freedom movement um that took place um around the time of after you know people were freed from slavery, but also post-Reconstruction, you have people moving into freedom towns. Can you talk about that?

Orlando Bailey 1:09:29

Yeah, I mean, you know, generally speaking, I want y'all to know that Donna stole one of y'all questions because she just asked the question. This is the last question. I was trying to transition it.

Donna Givens Davidson 1:09:42

I was trying to direct the question about hope to Aaron so he could also come in wing on hope. Thanks to thanks, Orlando.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:50

I love it.

Orlando Bailey 1:09:51

Go down to the Latimer Lounge or the book signing and all of that.

SPEAKER_04 1:09:55

You know, generally, um when these kinds of responses, utopian smaller scale responses, tend to arise uh when there is a sense that you know the state is not providing in the way that people need, you know. Um and it's these small one reason I wanted to write the book is because I wanted to speak to people who were young in the 60s and 70s, who saw tanks go down their streets, you know, who saw American cities on fire, who lost their, you know, siblings in the Vietnam War, uh a pointless war. Um and somehow still managed to devote decades of their lives to creating this movement and were able to speak to me after seeing what happened in 2020. And and they said, you know, I'm pretty hopeful, you know. Um and and so it's like the conversations with with these people, right? Seeing what they did every day. Um, I think that that's what gives me hope. Um, you know. Uh what we see, like even if we think about the reparations movement and the conversation that was happening around that in 2020 and 2021, it owes a lot to what happened in Detroit in the 1960s. Here you had the National Black Uh Economic Development Conference, which is where they announced, which is where you know James James Foreman um announced the creation of the Black Manifesto, which was a call particularly for religious uh institutions, white religious institutions, to give $500 million to to black movements, right? Um uh 1989, you know, it's it's to um uh Michigan Congress people, you know, who HR 40. Yes, HR 40 who are calling every year, beginning in 1989, for reparations, right? It's uh people like the black, you know, real estate agent here, reparations Ray Jenkins, they called him, who was calling, you know, for that to happen. Um uh this was not something that that I mean no law mandated that these people do this, right? This was because of local conversations that were happening, local actions that that people were taking. And then eventually, decades later, um the conversation reaches this national scale. Now we it's a it's a separate conversation entirely about the the the you know the backsliding on uh promises for reparations that were made in 2020 and 2021. But the point is um for these conversations to happen on a national and international scale, they happen in your backyard, right? They have a place of movement.

Orlando Bailey 1:12:55

Yeah, absolutely. Uh everybody please join me in thanking Aaron Roberts and Michelle Adams.