“The Metropolitan Moment: Municipal Boundaries, Segregation, and Civil Rights Possibilities in the American North”

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.Ph.D