The court took up the case in February 1974 and struck down the lawsuit 5–4, saying that since the suburbs did not cause Detroit’s problems, suburbanites did not have to be part of the solution. The Milliken case absolved white parents of any responsibility for integration and effectively halted a strategy that would have helped Detroit achieve desegregation and given Black children access to the well-resourced schools white people had established in its suburbs. Joyce Baugh, a professor who has written extensively about the case, says it intensified white people’s desire to “move away from
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