at the Benjamin N. 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. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, and elsewhere. She was born and grew up in Detroit.
Adams applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North, and reported the following:
The Containment: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and the Battle of Racial Justice in the North tells the story of a legal decision that would have greatly reduced school segregation in the Northern parts of the United States -- if it had been allowed to stand. But just over fifty years ago, the Supreme Court struck that decision down.Learn more about The Containment at the publisher's website.
On page 99 of my book, the reader will learn some of Roy Wilkins’ backstory. Wilkins was the executive director of the NAACP during the time the book’s action takes place (the early and mid 1970s). The page summarizes some of the criticisms that Wilkins faced from others in the Black activist community, but also presents evidence of his daring and bravery on behalf of the civil rights movement. On that page, the reader learns about Wilkins and the work the NAACP did during this era – which was extremely important. But that’s only one part of The Containment’s sweeping narrative.
The Containment is a book about the development of legal doctrine, but that rich story is told from the perspective of various characters, such as Roy Wilkins. My book asks how and why people make the decisions that they do. This was true of Wilkins. It’s also true of the white judge at the heart of the case I write about. Judge Roth, on the face of it, should not have been an ally of those seeking to desegregate schools in the Detroit area. But he was. Roth changed because he was open to being persuaded by the facts. A lesson that’s still so timely and important today.
--Marshal Zeringue
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