I thought my parents moved to Holly for the schools. I was wrong.

You’d think my parents would have told me we fled integration.

Instead, they said: We moved because of the schools.

My family runs four generations deep here in southeastern Michigan: Pontiac and Waterford, Ann Arbor and Detroit, Rose Township and White Lake. My great-grandparents were Ozark migrants and small-town laborers — or their wives — all of them flocking to industrial towns from Pontiac to Sault Sainte Marie. As I remember it, if my family ever talked about racism, it was to lament my grandparents’ continuing use of the N-word, and to congratulate ourselves on doing better.

My parents made their own migration in 1981, when I was 4, trading a bungalow on a stretch of Rensselaer Street in Oak Park zoned into Ferndale schools for a Rose Township colonial zoned into Holly schools. My father tells me he doesn't remember thinking about the schools back then, as he moved his three pre-school children. He says he doesn't remember telling me, when I was a teenager that we moved because of the schools, that if we had stayed in Oak Park, he would have had to pay for private school. He never told me what that meant.

It took four decades before I questioned what my father told me. It took a book contract for me to learn the truth for myself. It took this year's presidential election, as I watched white resentment morph into popular support for a racist presidential candidate for the second time in eight years, for me to understand how dangerous it has been to leave it all unsaid.

What they didn't tell me

Starting in 1968, the School District of the City of Ferndale began to receive letters from the Office for Civil Rights at the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare flagging concerns about segregation. The segregation in Ferndale was not de jure — written into law by government — the way it was in the American South. Instead, segregation of Ferndale’s schools and resources was considered de facto: enabled by private practices that government had, at the time, declined to correct.

These practices showed up clearly at Ferndale’s Ulysses S. Grant Elementary. Although the district was only 9% Black, in 1968, every one of the 365 students at Grant was Black. The other 31 Black elementary students in Ferndale Schools that year attended school among the district's 3,866 white elementary students. The quality of education at Grant was so clearly inferior to that offered at the district’s nine overwhelmingly white elementaries that Black parents petitioned the district to give Grant students “the same kind of educational material” offered in those school buildings.

That was six years before my parents moved to the district, and seven before I was born.

Maybe that’s why my parents never told me how, in 1969, the Ferndale School Board’s attorney, Burton R. Shifman, did not object to the facts federal officials used in their first complaint about the segregation of Ferndale’s schools. He did not object to the poor education that Black students received. He objected, instead, to using the word “segregated” to describe an all-Black school in a majority-white district. “Ferndale has never ... segregated its pupils by race,” he wrote.

The schools, Shifman wrote, had not caused the problem; it was “solely the result of residential housing segregation.” Why would the schools have to fix a problem they had not caused?

Nobody taught me that, from 1968 to 1973, Ferndale fought its first battle to preserve segregation in its schools. Or how, in 1970, it lost in agency rulings. Or how it lost on appeal to the agency, and then on appeal to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. Or how it appealed those rulings again, to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals — and lost again, in 1973. Or how, later that year, the district made a fourth appeal, to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to even hear their case. Or how, after this final defeat, the district opted to forgo federal money rather than integrate Grant.

In 1973, Ferndale became the first northern district to lose funding for refusing to integrate its schools. District documents suggest the schools sacrificed much of their vocational education as a result.

Fighting integration

In 1974, Ferndale officials added “open enrollment” to the district's schools. This allowed all families to send their children to any of the district's elementaries. No white families accepted the invite to send their children to Grant’s regular program, and its student body stayed entirely Black. A judge compared the district's policy one Southern schools used to preserve segregation: “freedom of choice."

In 1975, as my parents moved to Oak Park, Ferndale launched its first attempt to integrate Grant: a magnet program there that enrolled 200 students — 31 Black, 169 white. Magnet students met on a separate floor and ate lunch at school, while Grant’s 230 other "traditional" students, all Black, went home for lunch. This kept the magnet students entirely segregated from students whose school they had joined.

The U.S. Department of Justice objected to this “solution” to integration and sued the district under a new law, the Equal Educational Opportunities Act of 1974. Or that, when this case went to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Judge Cornelia Kennedy, a Nixon appointee, rejected the case on the grounds that the federal agency had not named a student as part of its case.

Nobody explained that in April 1976, the DOJ added a district child to its case. Or that the government’s attorney, Thomas Keeling, noted that no solution would be acceptable unless it “in fact desegregate(s) the Grant school.” The magnet program, he said, “clearly does not do that.”

I was born six months later.

Progress, at last

In 1978, the year my younger sisters were born, the Sixth Circuit overturned Kennedy’s 1975 decision, saying it found “no logic at all” in her ruling.

In the summer of 1980, Ferndale schools offered, finally, three earnest proposals for integrating its elementary schools. The first two plans bused Black children to white elementary schools, while white children stayed at schools within walking distance of their homes. The Eastern District — where Judge Horace Gilmore sat in place of Kennedy — rejected these first two plans.

“The Constitution will not tolerate a desegregation plan that places a five-to-one burden on black students as compared to white students,” wrote Gilmore in the Detroit Free Press.

Nobody told me that as I turned 4 that fall, the judge approved Ferndale’s third proposal, which spread busing across the district. The district agreed to stop running multiple elementary schools that taught all grades but, in the process, segregated the district’s students — and thus its spending on them — by race. Instead, it planned to assign classes to buildings by grade.

Not without cost

In January 1981, 12 years after the original complaint was filed, Ferndale integrated its elementary schools. Black students who'd been in kindergarten when the suit began were now seniors in high school.

Journalists estimated that the district had given up $2 million in funding in its bid to prolong segregation.

On June 12, 1981, the Detroit Free Press declared: “Busing Gets an A: Integration Is a Success in Ferndale.” If my parents had chosen to stay in their home, I would have started kindergarten in an integrated school.

The next day, my family moved to Rose Township. Because of the schools.

I didn't know that we were joining a surge of new residents that more than doubled the area's population from 1960 to 1980. Census records show that nearly all these new families were white, with the townships included in the district averaging 98.0% white in 1980. We came to Holly even though the local paper reported it was too poor to afford full-length school days, and the high school was in danger of losing accreditation.

I wonder which places and schools my classmates' families had fled.

I wonder what their parents told them then — and what they tell them now.

I wonder if my classmates admire, as I do, Ferndale Schools' addition of a historical marker acknowledging its history of segregation. I wonder if they sense, as I do, that being honest about this history is necessary, if not sufficient. I wonder if they see how easily our democracy could crumble under the weight of all the racist things white Americans have done — and still do — and so rarely admit to aloud.

I wonder if they wish, like me, that our parents had told us the truth.

Tracie McMillan is the author of "The White Bonus: Five Families and the Cash Value of Racism in America" and the New York Times bestseller "The American Way of Eating," which won the Books for a Better Life Award and the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online and in print.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: My parents moved to a white town. They said it was for the schools.