Albert Cleage

King, and the other is more of a Black nationalist ideal, which we associate with Malcolm X.

And in, in effect, what we had in Detroit was we had our own sort of local versions of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, right? We had Remus Robinson, who was sort of our kind of version of, of MLK, and we had Albert Cleage, who was sort of our kind of version of, of Martin Lu- of, uh, Malcolm X.

In fact, they knew each other.

Um, and that debate is interwoven with the, the whole process that gets the litigation underway that eventually ends up in the Supreme Court that, in the case I just described to you, M- uh, Milliken versus Bradley.

And so to, so to work backwards from 1974, you kinda have to start in the late 1960s to understand how we got to the point that the Supreme Court would be deciding that issue.

And so I set that up by talking about Albert Cleage, who's incredibly interesting, uh, local preacher, a Christian Black nationalist, brilliant guy, went to Oberlin, um, and who I think, like many Black folks of his generation, had been extraordinarily damaged by Jim Crow, right? Uh, and, uh, he was passionately committed to the Black community and passionately committed to Black education.

And one of the things that he said that was deeply true, which is that Black children were being under-educated in the city of Detroit, uh, by the Detroit school system, and he became a proponent of, of trying to protect those children, and he came to believe over a series of things that occurred, occurred for him in the 1960s that the only way that Black children were gonna get a fair shake and a real education in the city of Detroit was for Black parents effectively to take over the Black, take over the school system and basically take the authority away from a, a centralized school system that was dominated by white folks, even though there was a, a very important Black member of the, of the Detroit school board, Remus Robinson, we'll talk about in a second, uh, on the school board.

But he became convinced that it would be impossible for Black children to, to be educated in that environment.