As a legal scholar and Detroit native, Michelle Adams had plenty of reasons to take more than a passing interest in the Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court case. The 1974 ruling determined that, although Detroit's public schools had been illegally segregated, a plan to fix that by combining the predominantly Black district with surrounding white suburbs would not move forward, essentially halting Northern desegregation efforts across the country.

In her debut book, The Containment, the University of Michigan law professor digs deep into the history and legal precedents that led up to, and resulted from, this landmark case in a rigorously researched, moving, and accessible account of how civil rights leaders fought to expose Northern Jim Crow and promote multiracial K-12 education as a meaningful way to undo its harms and strengthen U.S. democracy for all.

Published earlier this year after 10 years of work—and three rewrites—the book has been praised by The New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post. But even more important to Adams, it has helped spark real conversations with readers—from those who lived through it to those who had never heard of the case before—and shine a light on those continuing to work toward school integration, such as the National Coalition on School Diversity, which recently invited her to speak.

We talked with Adams about the "extraordinary, life-changing experience" of writing her first book, connections between the past and present, and what gives her hope for today.

Q: One of the things I really enjoyed about the book is how, in addition to all the facts and dates and names, you interject your own thoughts in an understated way and even with some humor.
A: I tried to do that and I worked hard on my tone and making the reader trust me. I was obsessed with the reader in that book, and I think that the response I'm getting is consistent with that obsession.

Q: What has the response been like?
A: I couldn't really have asked for more positive publicity. But I think what's really important is just the people that I've been able to engage with who I never would have met. People talking about how it drives their memory of things that happened to them during the time, what their parents were thinking. Some people say things like, "I didn't know anything about this and it's just an amazing world." That's been the most important thing: being able to communicate with readers across the spectrum and invite folks who maybe don't necessarily think they would be open to this kind of argument to pivot and try to be open to everybody, no matter where they're coming from across the political spectrum.

Q: In the introduction, you talk about some personal events that sparked this idea for you. When did you know this was a book and how did it eventually come together from there?
A: I've been teaching law since '95. I've taught a wide variety of topics, and Milliken is a case I've always been interested in and wanted to know more about. I'm from Detroit, it happened when I was a kid and going to school in the suburbs. At one point, I just started reading and reading and reading, and I realized there was a story there, not just that it was an interesting case or a profoundly important case, but that there was a story that was interesting in itself. I knew that I wanted to write about it, but then that raised a question for me, which is, "How do I tell a story?" I've never written a book before. I've never written narrative, character-driven nonfiction, which I didn't know at the time is the hardest thing to do. So, I had to teach myself how to do a lot of things, like be a journalist and interview people and all that type of stuff.

Q: The amount of research that went into this book is kind of mind-blowing. How did you manage all of it?
A: I could never have done this without Cardozo Law School or the University of Michigan Law School. What I needed to have access to was basically a small army of very smart young lawyers. And that's what I have. If you look at the acknowledgement, you'll see a paragraph-length page of just names. And those are all the young lawyers who started working with me in the summer of 2013, all the way through just now. They all contributed something that was important to the book. For instance, there's 41 days of trial transcripts, and each of the days was over 100 pages. So you can do the math. I had my students read through those, and then they all wrote memos of exactly what was happening and synthesized it. Then I went back and read the memos and then I re-read the transcripts myself looking for particular things.

If I had to do it all myself, it would have taken five or six times as long. And then I had professors from different disciplines who read drafts along the way. So, it's my work, but I've been surrounded by a community of scholars and lawyers who've assisted me in ways that are great and small.

Q: One of the prevailing themes of the book is this idea that Northern Jim Crow and housing segregation were inseparable from school segregation, and it's still an issue today. With that in mind, what gives you hope for change today?
A: I'm by nature an optimist and I'm by nature a patriotic person who believes in the nation. And I think Martin Luther King believed in the nation. A variety of other civil rights leaders believed in the nation. We're coming out of and we are in, I think, a moment of great pessimism and great concern about the direction of our country. But this is not the first time that we've faced extraordinary challenges, and I believe we will get through them.

The reason I wrote the book, separate from telling the great story and other things that interest me, was that I really wanted to work on the demand side of school integration. I think public perception is that we tried integration. It failed. It didn't work very well. People didn't like it. And the story is much more complicated than that. So one of the things we have to do today is raise people's awareness and their consciousness about what the alternatives are and about creating demand in parents for well-resourced, equal, racially integrated education.

Q: As I read the book, it was hard not to think of current events, especially in the way issues are framed when it comes to undoing the harms of segregation, and also with all of the talk about activist judges. What are some specific connections you hope readers will make?
A: First, I didn't know I was going to end up writing a book about the nature and history and the makings of Northern Jim Crow. And once I got fully into the research, it's all there. So, part of it is just understanding that. But the next layer of what the book is about is understanding that the moves that the NAACP and Black activists were making, and the whole Brown [vs. Board of Education] movement, was really about democracy and making it possible for African Americans to be full citizens of the United States, but also enhancing democracy for all. And I think that's the connection to today's moment. We're in a moment where the question is, "Are we going to have a functioning democracy?" and Brown was always about that. If you go back and take a look at the case, there's a whole section about the importance of public schools, but the reason why the court is saying public schools are so important is because they educate our children to become citizens in our democracy.

Second, the book is in large part about housing, and another one of the things we're talking about today is how to stimulate the building of more housing and how to create more affordable housing. If we create more housing and more integrated neighborhoods, we will have integrated schools. There's a variety of things to think about there. But my contribution to the conversation is creating the demand.

Q: There are many really interesting characters in this book. One who becomes central to the story is U.S. District Judge Stephen Roth because he is able to be persuaded from one opinion to another after seeing the evidence. Do you believe someone in that kind of position can still have that kind of open mind in such a politicized environment today?
A: I have two thoughts. There's a lot of discussion in the book about judging. At some point I talk about why judging is hard, and in a lot of ways, this is a love letter to some of the Black judges of that era, as well as to Judge Roth. So part of it is just talking about the key elements we need in a judge, and understanding that a fidelity to law is foremost, but we also need to have the ability to be open-minded. If our mind is closed on every issue, you're not judging anything. You're just rubber-stamping what you already believe.

The second part is the difference in the information environment, and I think that's really where the problem is. I believe in our country, and I believe in our lawyers, and I believe in our judges, and I believe that there are many, many judges out there who bring the kind of qualities that Judge Roth brought to the job. The problem is that the information environment has changed so radically. People are getting information in a very narrow-casted way, both left and right. And that does raise problems and concerns about how people get information. It becomes about more than just the quality or the nature of the individual.

Q: You grew up in Detroit and you describe returning to the city while doing your research. How has getting acquainted with Detroit in this new way changed or shaped the way that you think about it?
A: Most of all, it gives me an appreciation for my parents, because they were both born in Detroit, understanding how they grew up and what their environment was like. Detroit's history is so long and interesting, so I don't purport to be an expert in the city of Detroit; I'm an expert in that moment in time. But what it's given me is a greater appreciation for what Black folk of that generation thought about a little bit, what was going on in the city at the time. I read a tremendous amount of news media—the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News—and became intimately familiar with how those papers were covering the story. So, I just have an appreciation for the city and what was happening and the depopulation that was beginning to happen and that kind of thing. It's just given me an appreciation for my hometown.

Q: This was your first book and you mentioned that if you knew what it was going to take to write it, you might not have started, but here you are. Will there be another book?
A: I will definitely write another book or two. I developed a skill set that I'm certainly not going to put on the shelf now. I love the process, and people are responding to the product. I think people are hungry to learn, and it's almost like I'm giving an opportunity for folks who haven't gone to law school to get a little bit of a legal education. I don't want to talk about what the ideas are at this point, because they're not concrete, but there's no question in mind that I will write another book, or several.

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer.