Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto
Almost 60 years later, segregation is apparently still the will of the people–just look at any demographic map of Chicago. And that’s despite the fact that for the last 40-odd years the city has been the site of a landmark federal desegregation case. Filed in 1967, Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority–widely considered the Brown v. Board of Education of housing law–has to date accomplished only one-quarter of its goal, though in the process it has spun off enough bewildering subplots to program a whole cable channel. Waiting for Gautreaux, attorney Alexander Polikoff’s new memoir-cum-history of this tangled legal tale, is as lucid and genial as Polikoff is in person. It should cement his place among the nonwealthy nonpoliticians who’ve done the most for Chicago. But his can-do optimism makes it easy to overlook the paradoxes of the case that has consumed much of his working life.
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In 1966 Chicago Urban League research director Harold Baron contacted Polikoff and fellow attorney Chuck Merkel, who together had just won a school desegregation lawsuit in Waukegan. Baron outlined Chicago’s sorry public-housing history, and once they were hooked he found CHA residents willing to bring a class-action lawsuit against their landlord. Late that summer Polikoff, Merkel, and three colleagues filed on behalf of Dorothy Gautreaux, Odell Jones, Doreatha Crenchaw, Robert Fairfax, Eva Rodgers, and James Rodgers, representing the 40,000 families then living in CHA housing.
CHA residents had no seat at the table–a fact Polikoff has taken flak for over the years. “Gautreaux remains a case brought on behalf of blacks by white lawyers,” he admits in the book. “Not the ideal posture for a public interest lawsuit supposed to vindicate community rights.” But he contends he and his colleagues had no meaningful way to consult with their 40,000 clients. And if they had, what if they said something they didn’t want to hear? “Either we would anger the very persons whose views we had sought by ignoring their counsel, or because of the views of some outsider to the case we would disregard our own best judgment, which is what our clients were entitled to receive.”
By 1987, when Judge Marvin Aspen (the third on the case) appointed a private firm to do the job the CHA wouldn’t, the stall had worked. “Practically no developable land remained in predominantly white neighborhoods that could be purchased within [federal] cost limits,” writes Polikoff. About half of the 1,813 units that did finally get built went into low-income Latino neighborhoods. Gautreaux, a tool designed to blur the black-and-white lines of the city in 1969, was now being used to integrate blacks and Latinos.
By the 1990s CHA high-rises were physically crumbling. Judge Austin’s ruling forbade tearing them down and rebuilding in the ghetto, but that’s what Polikoff agreed to as the 1996 Democratic National Convention at the United Center drew near. Mayor Daley was primping the neighborhood for the out-of-town guests, repairing the streets and installing trees, a park, and a new branch library. At the same time, residents of the dilapidated nearby Henry Horner Homes had taken the CHA to court, accusing the agency of gross neglect and asking that the Horner buildings be torn down and rebuilt. “Had we stood in their way,” Polikoff writes, “the powerful national and local political forces bent on prettying up the United Center environs for the Democratic Convention could well have swept Gautreaux away, ending any role at all for the case in public housing redevelopment.” Gautreaux had been designed to bring about racial integration. Instead Polikoff allowed mixed-income housing to be built at Horner in the pious hope that racial integration might follow.
