Papers by Michael Savage
PhD Dissertation, 2018
Exploring battles over school desegregation in metropolitan Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia in ... more Exploring battles over school desegregation in metropolitan Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia in the 1960s and 1970s, “The Metropolitan Moment” examines how black and white city dwellers at odds over integration within the city pursued – and sometimes allied over – efforts that crossed municipal lines to incorporate the suburbs in desegregation remedies. Though possessing divergent motivations, such as the white tactical aim of ensuring white majorities in all area schools by enlarging the desegregation area and the black desire for improved educational opportunities, both groups sought access to white suburban schools and at times acted together in court in an attempt to implement metropolitan desegregation. The search for such solutions opened a “metropolitan moment” across the urban North in the late 1960s and early 1970s when proposed regional remedies offered real possibilities of heading off white flight, fostering interracial coalitions, and substantively combatting segregation. Though this moment was foreclosed by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley – a case prompted in part by just such a surprising urban black-white alliance in Detroit – its legacies, including suburban anti-busing movements that helped fuel the rise of the New Right and the transformation of the Democratic Party, and the larger retreat from metropolitan solutions to metropolitan dilemmas of race, schooling, services, and inequality, echo down to today. The findings complicate several historiographies pertaining to the long civil rights movement, post-World War II urban and suburban history, the rise of the right, and representations of the “busing” controversy. Throughout, “The Metropolitan Moment” broadens the conception of the municipal reformer to include both ordinary black parents and white reactionaries.
Journal of Urban History, 2018
From the early 1960s onward, battles over school desegregation took on an increasingly metropolit... more From the early 1960s onward, battles over school desegregation took on an increasingly metropolitan orientation, one all but destroyed by the Supreme Court’s 1974 decision in Milliken v. Bradley. In Boston, Detroit, and Philadelphia, segregationist urbanites, when faced with a legal challenge either created or made possible by black civil rights advocates, reversed course and trumpeted the advantages of metropolitan desegregation. These tactical metropolitanists recognized that a larger desegregation area reaching into the predominantly white suburbs would mean that white children would continue attending majority-white schools and they understood that stoking suburban opposition to desegregation could defeat integrationist legislation. Despite their segregationist motives, tactical metropolitanists offered a potentially productive solution capable of mitigating white flight, providing lasting integration, and aligning with the efforts of integrationist civil rights advocates in court. Uncovering tactical metropolitanism complicates our understandings of urban segregation and the sources of metropolitan reform. It suggests the need for a metropolitan history of civil rights that centers the importance of municipal boundaries in perpetuating inequality.
Conference Presentations by Michael Savage
In March 1972, during the remedial hearings on the Bradley v. Milliken school desegregation case ... more In March 1972, during the remedial hearings on the Bradley v. Milliken school desegregation case in Detroit, a white homeowners' group that initially formed to oppose school integration, the Citizens' Committee for Better Education (CCBE), argued the same thing as the NAACP: that any school desegregation plan should not be limited to the central city alone. Placing school segregation in its metropolitan context, both groups urged the inclusion of politically autonomous, virtually all-white suburbs in remedying segregation. In fact, it was the CCBE that first brought this issue up in court – not the plaintiff NAACP. Far from an anomaly, in other cities – notably Philadelphia and Boston – metropolitan arguments were advanced most forcefully by urban whites who possessed little commitment to the concept of integration. Many urban whites supported metropolitan integration because it would mean fewer black students in their children's schools. These metropolitan arguments did not require a genuine transformation in outlook – those making them were free to continue working against integration politically, as CCBE members did by supporting George Wallace's drive for the 1972 Democratic Presidential nomination and by advocating for an anti-busing constitutional amendment. Despite this, the metropolitan arguments nevertheless articulated a significant residence-and class-based challenge to the suburban methods of exclusion which kept African Americans and many poor whites confined to the central cities. In recovering the history of metropolitan arguments, two themes become abundantly clear: metropolitan remedies for segregation had a longer history than is typically appreciated, and the the poles of urban segregation and metropolitan integration were not as far apart one would expect.
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Papers by Michael Savage
Conference Presentations by Michael Savage