Michigan Law
The ongoing process of teaching and learning creates a chain of human knowledge that spans generations, Professor Michelle Adams said during an informal “blue jeans” lecture recently.
“The highest level of teaching is about our faith in the future,” Adams told the Michigan Law community. “It’s about the idea that one person can communicate something they’ve thought about to someone else who maybe hasn’t thought about that subject quite as much—and together, they can go into a new place. Then, at some point, the student becomes the teacher and that whole cycle repeats again.
“When we talk about teaching, we’re also talking about life—what it means to be part of the link in the great chain of learning, education, and humanity.”
Adams, the Henry M. Butzel Professor of Law, spoke as the winner of the 2024 L. Hart Wright Teaching Award—the oldest of the annual student-nominated awards presented by the Law School Student Senate. An expert on race discrimination and related subjects, Adams has taught courses on constitutional law; the First Amendment; and race, law, and history.
She recently published “The Containment: Detroit, The Supreme Court, and the Battle for Racial Justice in the North” (Macmillan, 2025). The book details the history and impact of Milliken v. Bradley, the landmark Detroit school desegregation case that effectively ended the era of Brown v. Board of Education.
As part of her lecture, Adams shared an excerpt from her book and took questions from students in the audience. The core of the talk, though, was five lessons she has learned in her work.
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“I’m a much, much, better teacher today than I was that very first semester, and it isn’t because I know more law—although I do—it’s because I’ve gone through countless hours of study and repetition on how law students receive information, what questions they are likely to ask, and how to successfully manage the classroom,” Adams said.
“But more than that, I now have a sense of the deep structure of constitutional law. I get how the pieces fit together, and that’s different from just knowing a lot of doctrine. When you marry the thousands of hours I’ve spent teaching to the thousands of hours I’ve spent studying constitutional law, you begin to reach true mastery in terms of performance in the classroom. I don’t know that I’m ever going to get there, but I’m a lot closer than I was in the fall of 1995.”
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Adams noted that it took her 12 years to write her book, and if she had known that going in, she might not have ever started. Along the way, she had to learn a number of new skills, such as interviewing and demography.
“If you get to a point in your practice — or whatever it is you want to do with respect to what you’re trying to master — and you get frustrated, do not give up,” she said. “Keep going. You’ll get there. It just might take you a little bit longer than you thought.”
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Adams related how during the research for her book, she found herself getting angry at the historical words of a Detroit preacher and activist named Albert Cleage, who was an advocate for Black nationalism in the 1960s.
Reading his words that were critical of the Black middle class, Adams said she realized, “The minister was talking about my parents. They were proud members of the Black middle class. What did this guy know about that?”
Yet, she said that continuing to think about his words opened up a whole new perspective: that her story was set against the backdrop of two modes of Black political thought—integration and black nationalism. “If I’d stayed in my feelings, in my anger, it would’ve distracted me from the real work of the project.”
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Cleage’s story also led to the next lesson, Adams said. As she learned more about his life and the experiences of others like him, she came to understand him, even though she still didn’t agree with his politics.
“I used those insights and applied them to other characters in my book. I applied the same kind of empathy to the white characters in my book, and that allowed me to be able to think about the idea of making choices under systematic constraints,” she said.
“Did many whites behave badly during this period, roughly ’68 to ’74? Yes, they did, and I have the receipts to prove it,” Adams said. “But empathy allowed me to discover and tell the stories that you probably don’t know—about Maxine Rose and some of the other white folks in the suburbs, not an extraordinary number, but some who were trying to figure out a way to build bridges with Black parents in the city of Detroit.”
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“My book is about this great American story, one that we’re still telling today, still fighting about today, still struggling over today,” Adams said. She noted that her favorite figures in the book are “the democracy-loving, coalition-building, work-within-the-system guys,” including Roy Wilkins, a former head of the NAACP; Remus Robinson, the first Black member of the Detroit School Board; and Black judges such as Thurgood Marshall, Damon Keith, and Harry Edwards, ’65.
“Some of them risked their lives, they sat in, they advocated, they protested, they litigated cases in Southern Jim Crow courts, they went undercover in the South to protect the rights of Black workers there. They put their bodies on the line,” she said.
“As they aged, they changed their tactics but not their belief in this nation and our democracy. …Collectively, they were fighting for Black citizenship and the citizenship rights of all Americans. And that, as I discovered through my research, was at the core of the promise of Brown v. Board of Education.”
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