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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We have a chance now to speak with one of the winners of this year's Hillman Prize for journalism in the service of the common good, and one of their judges, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. We'll also ask Jamelle about a couple of his recent columns, the one called Trump Is Fixated on 1896, and the one in which the headline asks, What Is the Left's Theory of Power? Our prize winner guest is University of Michigan law professor Michelle Adams, author of the book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. Among other things, she also served on President Biden's commission on the Supreme Court. Jamelle, it's always great to have you on with us, and Professor Adams, congratulations on your Hillman Prize and welcome to WNYC.

Michelle Adams: Thank you so much. Great to be here.

Jamelle Bouie: It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Jamelle. For listeners who may know the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize, but not the Hillman Prize for journalism, would you, as one of their judges, do a little intro for those listeners?

Jamelle Bouie: Absolutely. The Hillman Prize honors Sidney Hillman, the great labor leader of the New Deal era. It is focused on books, magazine articles, news articles, radio journalism, video journalism, broadcast, all kinds of stuff. We award all kinds of stuff that is done with an eye towards the public good. Historically, the Hillman has gone to work obviously around labor, around civil rights, around questions of foreign policy, but again, all focused on what is being done with the goal of pursuing the public good, the common good. This year is the 76th Hillman prizes. The Hillman Foundation's been doing this for a minute.

Brian Lehrer: Winners this year include Wired in the magazine category for its reporting called The Doge Takeover of the Federal Government, Doris Burke and Ginger Thompson from ProPublica in the category reporting on racial and economic justice. Their story was called Sick in a Hospital Town and more, including Professor Adams for her book in the book category. Jamelle, I'll stay with you, so I don't ask Professor Adams to boast about herself. Why was her book The Containment worthy of a Hillman Prize?

Jamelle Bouie: First of all, it is just a wonderfully written piece of nonfiction work. It's journalistic, it's academic, and it covers what we thought was a vitally important history in question, which is about the history of school integration.

Brian Lehrer: Did we lose Jamelle's line? Jamelle, you there? All right. We'll try to reconnect Jamelle. Professor Adams, are you there?

Michelle Adams: I am.

Brian Lehrer: Good.

Michelle Adams: I'll pick right up.

Brian Lehrer: Okay. Go ahead and pick right up.

Michelle Adams: I can talk a little bit about the book while we're trying to reconnect. First of all, I just want to reiterate what an incredible honor it is to receive this award. I never, in a million years, dreamed that I would.

My book is an opportunity to try to have a conversation and to invite as many people as possible into my constitutional law classroom, but to tell a story in a way that's broadly accessible about a moment in time in the late 1960s, early 1970s, when we had a chance to integrate both our schools and our neighborhoods, and why that didn't happen, and the travel up to the Supreme Court, what happened to the Supreme Court when we got there, and a little bit about what happened after we left.

It's really the story of a litigation that took place in my hometown, Detroit, Michigan, where a group of really brilliant and talented lawyers brought a case against the school authorities, both state and local, and they alleged that there had been discrimination in the public schools in Detroit. The really interesting thing about this in 1970 was that everybody was focused on what was going on in the South, and suddenly now we had the question of whether you could establish a Brown violation in the North.

My book is about that story, and it's told from the perspective of many incredibly interesting characters and people. I had an opportunity to interview a bunch of folks who have now since passed, and so it was really a labor of love for me.

Brian Lehrer: We could say everyone knows Brown vs Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court intended to desegregate schools in the South in 1954. Not so many know about Milliken vs Bradley which, I think you'll say, perpetuated segregation in the North in 1974. Is that a decent way to put it?

Michelle Adams: Correct. I think it is. I think that everyone's taught about Brown at least a little bit about Brown, and then all the knowledge just falls off, "whatever happened to Brown?" Some folks maybe know, can trace that in the South. What happens when you have, effectively, what lawyers call de jure by law, segregation in the North, but there were no state laws that required it. Was it impossible then to actually have a Brown violation?

It turned out that in the North, what we were doing was we were segregating our schools, but we were using different kinds of methods. Really what the book is about, it's about Northern Jim Crow. We had a nationwide policy of Jim Crow, but we had regional variations. My book is about the northern variation of that.

What's so amazing about the trial in this case that led up to the Milliken vs Bradley case in 1974, and what I didn't know when I first started researching it, but I learned as I did, was that a group of lawyers in Downtown Detroit in the early 1970s basically put Northern Jim Crow on trial, and they basically showed how both housing and school segregation were perpetuated and were created in the North.

It was just a moment in time where you get a trial court judge who is really suspicious of their case, and then by the time they're done, ends up becoming one of the nation's loudest voices in favor of school desegregation. It was an opportunity to tell that story.

Brian Lehrer: The Hillman Prize people say you show how that case shaped an enduring resistance to affirmative action and civil rights reforms. Would you draw that line for us from Milliken vs Bradley in 1974 at the Supreme Court to the Students for Fair Admissions vs Harvard and UNC case from 2023 or anything else?

Michelle Adams: That case was decided in 2023. I think there's a relationship between the school desegregation cases and the affirmative action cases, and in my classroom we talk about them in the same section of the course.

I think the way that there's really a relationship is just that when we get to the Supreme Court, when the trial judge had decided that the state of Michigan and the city had violated the equal protection clause, when he decided that the best way to remedy that was to have a metropolitan-wide school desegregation order that would have affected about 50 different school districts across southeastern Michigan, including Detroit, when we get to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court ignores all of the things that happen below. It doesn't really take up the idea of Northern Jim Crow.

It really does put back this idea that we're going to have race conscious remedies and puts them on the back foot, and I think that's where you can begin to see this leak into other areas of the law, including affirmative action.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, anyone out there who read Professor Adams' book or want to say or ask anything about the case, Milliken vs Bradley and its relevance today or her book, The Containment or anything you always wanted to ask Jamelle Bouie after reading one of his columns, but you never had him over for dinner, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call or text. Jamelle is back with us now.

Jamelle, just on the issue, supporters of the 2023 decision and the current anti-DEI movement would say people should be judged on the content of their characters and not grouped by the color of their skin, the same argument that was used against Jim Crow, they would say. How would you respond?

Jamelle Bouie: Two things. The first, just with regards to the book, I wanted to add before I got dropped there, that part of the reason we wanted to award the book is precisely because there seems to be further retrenchment in the present day from the goal of an integrated society. I think telling this particular story helps illuminate that.

As for responding to that claim, I think what I would say is that the aim of civil rights laws, the aim of integration and desegregation, wasn't simply to treat people by their character, but to end systems of subordination, to end systems that group people by class and then put them at the lowest level of society. I often think to that response to say, affirmative action programs to DEI or whatever, is somewhat missing the point. It's an almost a non sequitur.

We're not talking about judging people not by their character. We're talking about being attentive to the legacies of subordination in this country and looking for ways to deal with those legacies of subordination, and that does actually mean recognizing who was subordinated.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Adams, your book is specifically about that case in Detroit, whereas you say you come from. Listener writes a text question, "How did this impact New York City?" Do you have anything on that?

Michelle Adams: The book really does take place between around 1968 and 1974 in Detroit, and so it's very much a story that's rooted in Detroit. It doesn't speak specifically to what happened in New York City. I think it is, though, a general approach to thinking about Northern desegregation and Northern segregation and Northern Jim Crow. Obviously New York's in the North, Michigan's in the North, and so some of the same kinds of techniques that we saw were used to segregate the schools in the city of Detroit were common across the North, including New York.

Brian Lehrer: You served, I see, on President Biden's Supreme Court Commission.

Michelle Adams: I did.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think that court needs reform in some way that serves everyone? Republicans would argue that people on the left just want to change the court now because they've been losing a lot lately.

Michelle Adams: I think there's a long history of people who feel that the Supreme Court doesn't have their ear wanting to change the court. There's nothing really new about that. If you go back to 1937, FDR had a court packing plan that he put before the Senate Judiciary Committee and it died there. This is nothing new. To be honest, I think the way that I would think about this is to step back and think, "How did we get into this situation to begin with?" The answer is we have to win elections. The focus has to be on winning presidential elections and winning the Senate, because the Senate controls the federal judiciary.

It's not just the Supreme Court. What we want to be doing is making sure that there's good political control there. I'm less focused on what are the different kinds of things that you might be able to do constitutionally now to be able to express displeasure with the Supreme Court. What I want to do is refocus the conversation and making sure that elections are won so that each party, both parties have equal opportunity to be able to place nominees on the Supreme Court as well as the lower federal courts, which are vitally important.

Brian Lehrer: Jamelle, let me use that as a segue to your recent column called What Is the Left's Theory of Power? What do you mean by theory of power?

Jamelle Bouie: In the context of that piece, I'm talking about theory of constitutional power and constitutional authority. How does it envision what the Constitution is as a political document? Does it have a particular constitutional vision that it hopes to instantiate? The political right certainly does. It has this executive forward almost Smithian vision.

Brian Lehrer: Whoops. I think you accidentally muted yourself, Jamelle. Can you hear me? Can you unmute?

Jamelle Bouie: I do not know why I keep muting myself. To continue, does the left have any vision for what it wants the constitutional order to be? That's the question of the piece. I'm riffing off of a really interesting piece in the Law and Political Economy website blog that is thinking through this question as well, and looking at the deficiencies of the current constitutional order.

Brian Lehrer: You argue that the right has a theory of constitutional power and the left does not. Would you compare and contrast a little specifically for our listeners?

Jamelle Bouie: Sure. I would say it's not so much that I think the left doesn't. It's just that I'm not sure it's a question that's live. Not that many people, I think, on the political left are thinking about it in a serious way. If I had to identify the political rights, theory of the Constitution, I think we can see it in action, which is this notion that the president, the executive, isn't simply one officer among many, an important one, a prominent one, but not someone who has overweening authority over the entire executive branch, but the president as the singular focus of the executive branch.

He is the executive branch. He embodies it, and thus has the right to effectuate his will over the entire executive branch to determine, according to his political judgment, what every part of the executive branch does, even if Congress disagrees, even if Congress is mandated differently via statute. This vision of the executive is interned against, I think, what conservatives view as the parts of the American state that shouldn't be there to begin with, the administrative state, the legacy of the New Deal, the regulatory state, civil rights enforcement.

They are making two arguments that this is the role of the president, and additionally, because the president, in their view, embodies the entire will of the nation, that president thus has the right to make these sweeping changes in unilateral fashion.

The interesting thing I'll say about the piece I was riffing off is the observation that there is a little bit of this inherent in the New Deal vision, in that you can almost understand Trump and his actions as taking that, turning it to 11, and using it for the purposes of the political right. One of the questions is, can you go back? Is the New Deal vision actually something you have to move past, recognize its contributions, but think differently about what you want the locus of power to be in the constitutional system?

Brian Lehrer: More Congress, less president. Your other relevant column that I want to ask you about, recent column, they're all relevant, is the one called Trump Is Fixated on 1896. Now, some of our listeners may already know that he likes William McKinley, who was elected president that year, largely because McKinley was a tariffs guy. That conversation was circulating last year. What was new to me in your column is that you bring the Iran war and the Venezuela invasion into the 1896 McKinley frame. Would you make that case for our listeners?

Jamelle Bouie: Sure. This is a period where we see the first real-- flourishing is the wrong word for this, but I can't think of a better one, of American imperialism. Under McKinley, the United States fights the Spanish American War, is taking territory in Cuba, in the Philippines, Puerto Rico, is engaged in imperial expansion, reaching out to Japan, to China to open markets in an imperial fashion. This is the age of the beginnings of American imperialism.

I really do think that even if Trump is not cognizant of this, although I think he might actually be, the coincidences are too strong. Even if Trump isn't cognizant of it, again, it's a reflection of his preoccupation with the late 19th century in American life. I'll say about that piece, some of it was me being a little tongue in cheek just with the president's conflict with the Pope, because it's funny to me that in addition to these more substantive things, you have this faint echo of nativist anti-clericism happening with the administration.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "Mr. Bouie is always interesting, illuminating and insightful. I wanted to know if he's a political scientist, but I've never had him over for dinner and haven't been able to ask." Now you're asked.

Jamelle Bouie: I'm not a political scientist by training. I have a bachelor's degree. I went to college, of course, but I studied political theory and religious studies. These days I'm just a guy who reads a lot of books.

Brian Lehrer: Professor Adams, I gave Jamelle the chance to comment on your work that won the Hillman Prize for Journalism in the public interest for your book. Is there anything that you, as a law professor who is steeped in history, think readers can learn from reading Jamelle, a New York Times current affairs columnist who is steeped in history?

Michelle Adams: Oh, I think you need to make sure that you've got your subscription updated to The New York Times. I think it's essential reading. I'm so glad for the work that Jamelle's doing. I can't point to any particular column, but I think that they're all incredibly useful. Also the focus on this question of the Constitution and the vision that the left might have for the Constitution, of course, that's music to my ears. It's one of the things that I think a lot about, and what do we want to see happen happening?

I go back to the comment I made earlier about the importance of democracy. I don't disagree about the idea that the right has a very aggressive, unitary executive theory, but on steroids. I agree with that. I also think when we're thinking about constitutional theory and what we would like to have happen, the notion that we want to-- whoever the president is, whether the president is President Trump or President Biden or President Obama, it, typically, is not a good idea to have something approaching an imperial presidency.

Getting the House and the Senate back into the business of actually exercising the constitutional powers that they enjoy, as opposed to ceding power to the executive, is incredibly important. That's a through line, whether it's Republican presidents or Democratic presidents. In terms of thinking about where we want to be in terms of the Constitution and whether it's left or right, I think what we're going to do is focus on democracy. When we cede that much power to the executive, it undercuts our fundamental commitments to the democratic process.

Brian Lehrer: Jamelle, one more for you before we go. From a listener, I'll give context to say that people who read you regularly, your column and your newsletter know that besides the Opinion column, you list things that you're reading and you even share recipes. A listener writes, "JB is the best journalist writing today," and asks, "What are JB's favorite movies?" Got anything for that listener?

Jamelle Bouie: Sure. Someone actually recently asked me this as well, and I have it top of mind. My favorite movies change from time to time, but for a while now, when I think about it, I have four answers. I'll give you four. The first is Sidney Lumet's Serpico. The next is Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. The next is Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. The final is Orson Welles, the Touch of Evil or Touch of Evil.

Brian Lehrer: You did have those top of mind. You want to take any one and say why? Then we're out of time.

Jamelle Bouie: Absolutely. Sure. Sidney Lumet, famous New Yorker, has a wide and varied filmography, not thought of as being auteur, thought of very much as being an actor's director. I love Serpico amongst his many, many excellent films because it's ostensibly about police corruption, but it really is about what it means and what it costs to have a cause, to have a passion, to have something that you cannot let go of, that you have to pursue, no matter the cost to your own life and your own livelihood and well being.

I think that I, myself, am just fascinated by that exploration of the personality type of a kind of person who is seized with a cause. You see some of that in The Last Temptation, as well. All these movies are about people who are seized with something that they can't quite shake, but Serpico is the one that I really go to again and again.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, there's our conversation with one of the winners of this year's Hillman Prize for journalism in the service of the common good and with one of their judges. The winner was University of Michigan law professor Michelle Adams, who authored the book The Containment: Detroit, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North. The judge was New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. We really appreciate both of you coming on with us for this. Professor Adams, congratulations again.

Michelle Adams: Thank you very much.

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