"EN-US">The governor and other accused officials
appealed to the Supreme Court, which took up the case February 27, 1974. The
subsequent Milliken v. Bradley decision would come to have enormous national
impact. According to Gary Orfield and Susan E. Eaton in their 1996 book
Dismantling Desegregation, the "Supreme Court's failure to examine the
housing underpinnings of metropolitan segregation" in Milliken made
desegregation "almost impossible" in northern metropolitan areas.
"Suburbs were protected from desegregation by the courts ignoring the
origin of their racially segregated housing patterns." "Milliken was
perhaps the greatest missed opportunity of that period," said Myron
Orfield, professor of law and director of the Institute on Metropolitan
Opportunity at the University of Minnesota, "Had that gone the other way,
it would have opened the door to fixing nearly all of Detroit's current
problems." John Mogk, a professor of law and an expert in urban planning
at Wayne State University in Detroit, says, "Everybody thinks that it was
the riots [in 1967] that caused the white families to leave. Some people were
leaving at that time but, really, it was after Milliken that you saw mass
flight to the suburbs. If the case had gone the other way, it is likely that
Detroit would not have experienced the steep decline in its tax base that has
occurred since then."
Supreme Justice William O. Douglas'
dissenting opinion in Miliken held that "there is, so far as the school
cases go, no constitutional difference between de facto and de jure
segregation. Each school board performs state action for Fourteenth Amendment
purposes when it draws the lines that confine it to a given area, when it
builds schools at particular sites, or when it allocates students. The creation
of the school districts in Metropolitan Detroit either maintained existing
segregation or caused additional segregation
