The Milliken decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.69 Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities. A "white noose" was tightening around places like Detroit. Justice Thurgood Marshall, appalled by the Court's decision, declared, "Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope
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