Alex Polikoff, who won a landmark discrimination case before the Supreme Court in 1976 showing that the City of Chicago had segregated Black and white public housing residents, and who then spent decades fighting to make sure that the court’s will was enforced, died on May 27 at his home in Keene, N.H. He was 98.
His daughter Eve Kodiak confirmed the death.
Mr. Polikoff’s class-action lawsuit, known as Gautreaux after its lead plaintiff, Dorothy Gautreaux, ranks among the most important decisions in the history of civil rights litigation.
Ms. Gautreaux, a public-housing resident, and her five co-plaintiffs claimed that the Chicago Housing Authority had systematically funneled Black residents into a small number of poorly constructed high-rise complexes, which became havens of crime and drug use.
Such segregation was an open secret in Chicago, and the subject of decades of protest — Mr. Polikoff filed the case in August 1966, just months after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began his own grass-roots campaign to desegregate the city.
But Chicago, under Mayor Richard J. Daley, pushed back. Dr. King left the city without success, while Mr. Polikoff spent a decade fighting the city in court. Ms. Gautreaux died in 1968, eight years before the case reached the Supreme Court.
By then, the lawsuit had been combined with a similar suit against the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In oral arguments before the court, Mr. Polikoff squared off against one of his former classmates from the University of Chicago Law School: Robert H. Bork, the solicitor general.
Mr. Polikoff won the case unanimously, 8-0. (Justice John Paul Stevens recused himself, having come from the appeals court that had heard the case earlier.) The decision opened the door to significant changes in the city’s public housing: Residents would be placed in smaller apartment blocks scattered through the city, or given vouchers to rent on the open market.
But the wheels of justice ground especially slowly in this case, and by 1980 only a handful of families had been moved. Mr. Polikoff was back in the courts, arguing that the city was stonewalling through “either deliberate delay or incompetence on a grand scale.”
Mr. Polikoff documented the process in his aptly titled 2006 memoir, “Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto.”
It took him until 1995 to get a court to order federal oversight of Chicago’s housing authority. Finally, in 2019 — 53 years after Mr. Polikoff first filed the suit — the city reached a settlement to remove that oversight.
Still, in the interim, thousands of low-income families of color had benefited from Mr. Polikoff’s efforts, and the city, while still extremely segregated in many ways, is probably a much more equitable place than it would have been without him.
“From my perspective, the activists who had the most impact on the lives of low-income Black families may well have been Alex Polikoff and the rest of his pro bono team of lawyers,” the journalist Clarence Page wrote in his foreword to “Waiting for Gautreaux.”
Alexander Lippman Polikoff was born on Jan. 24, 1927, in Chicago. His father, Julius, was also a lawyer, and his mother, Verna (Lippman) Polikoff, was an actress who later worked at her husband’s firm.
After a stint in the Navy, Mr. Polikoff attended the University of Chicago, where he took the Great Books course. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1949, a master’s degree in English in 1950 and a law degree in 1953.
He married Barbara Garland in 1951. She died in 2022, just after the couple had moved to New Hampshire to be near their daughter Eve.
Along with their daughter, Mr. Polikoff is survived by their son, Daniel Polikoff, and five grandchildren. Their daughter Joan Myra Polikoff died in 2016.
After law school, Mr. Polikoff went to work for a firm in downtown Chicago. He focused on corporate law there, but he also carved out a significant line of pro bono cases, mostly with the American Civil Liberties Union.
He fought to keep Henry Miller’s controversial novel “Tropic of Cancer,” which many considered pornographic, on bookstands around Chicago, and he defended people accused of disloyalty during the Red Scare. His work on Gautreaux also came through the A.C.L.U.
By then, he was considering going into public interest law full time. He made the leap in 1970, becoming executive director of a fledgling legal organization called Business and Professional People for the Public Interest.
Under Mr. Polikoff’s direction, the group, now known as Impact for Equity, took on a wide range of cases, including ones opposing a planned nuclear power plant and an unrealized plan to build an airport atop a landfill in Lake Michigan.
Mr. Polikoff stepped down as executive director in 1999, but he remained active with the organization until moving to New Hampshire.
Though a lifelong Chicagoan, he took quickly to small-town New England life. He lectured, enrolled in continuing education courses and wrote a book of political analysis, “Cry My Beloved America: A Call to Action” (2024).
“I’m proud of him,” his daughter said of his decision to restart his life in New Hampshire. “It may not seem as big as winning a Supreme Court case, but to me it was.”
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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