PRO‐Detroit: A pragmatic approach to school desegregation

Abstract

Michigan Senate Lansing, Michigan PRO-Detroit (People and Responsible Organizations for Detroit) was born on March, 1975, as an ad hoc temporary organization to serve as a coordinating and umbrella group for all the existing desegregation. Its one purpose was to work toward avoiding violence in the implementation of desegregation for Detroit and fifty-four surrounding suburbs. On July 25, 1974, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the metropolitan remedy ordered by the district court was improper because desegregation was bound to exist. Therefore, the Supreme Court recognized the remedy could not be metropolitan in scope but must be within the Detroit schools. The decision projected a certain false sense of finality. The suburbs, now no longer involved in.the situation, heaved a giant sigh of relief. Much of the furor which surrounded the original case was gone. The NAACP, which had begun the case as a single district school case, had evolved its theory to support the metropolitan remedy, while arguing that for Detroit alone would be counterproductive, and that any remedy confined to Detroit would merely expand the state-imposed black core. It didn't seem possible to many observers that the NAACP would abandon such a position and again ask for a Detroitonly remedy. On January 7, 1975, Judge Robert E. DeMascio succeeded Judge Roth who had died of a heart attack eighteen months earlier. DeMascio ordered the submission of new plans. The result was the introduction of two plans: one from the NAACP calling for the reassignment of 77,000 students and one from the Board of Education calling for the transfer of some 55,000 students. The prospects of massive in Detroit were again very much alive. Against this background, key leaders of the community from business, labor, city government, the school system and civic organizations were convened by the president of New Detroit, Inc., the city's urban coalition. There was agreement among this group that, since Detroit was faced with the inevitability of court-ordered public school desegregation, every effort had to be made to assure that an order would be implemented peacefully. All agreed that Detroit could not let the violence that had occurred during the past year in Boston in connection with court-ordered school desegregation be repeated here. The group agreed to form a new city-wide organization that would be neither for nor against busing but would seek the broadest city-wide coalition to endorse the effort for peaceful compliance with the court ruling. PRO-Detroit's first public meeting was held in 86 Theory Into Practice