In January 1966, on his 39th birthday, Alexander Polikoff had lunch with friends. They told him about a group of African-American organizations that had asked the ACLU to help them stop the CHA from building public housing exclusively in poor, black neighborhoods. Polikoff, a lawyer, had already helped the ACLU argue some major cases: they’d won the fight to put Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer back on bookshelves, though they’d lost the battle to get a law license for George Anastaplo, who’d been denied one after he refused to say whether he’d ever been a Communist. Polikoff became the lead attorney on Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority and Department of Housing and Urban Development, which eventually wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mara Tapp: What do you think of the CHA’s Plan for Transformation? Was the tearing down of the CHA high-rises what you envisioned?
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To realistically move a CHA family to such communities, some things are needed. Number one is the housing voucher. Number two is premove counseling, assistance [in overcoming] the obstacles that most CHA families face, such as credit problems, domestic-violence problems, crime-record problems, substance-abuse problems, skill-deficit and education-deficit problems, and information problems–not knowing where and how to look for a community of opportunity and to gain access to a landlord in it.
AP: Yes, it’s a big elephant. The Wallace lawsuit argued [that by] moving families from high-rise to low-rise ghettos CHA violated its contractual obligation to the families and its legal obligation under the law. The lawsuit was settled in the spring of 2005. CHA agreed to do a better job of premove counseling, and it also agreed to go back and retrofit these kinds of services to families who had already moved.
AP: I had to go through a kind of personal history to ground Gautreaux in history. In those years I was ignorant about a lot of things, particularly about race. Until 1965 we really had two streams of American history, then they merged in 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act. The first stream was slavery and sharecropping and jim crow. The second, parallel, stream was the experience of blacks outside the south, and that experience was ghettoization. The book makes the point that the dehumanization and degradation that went with ghettoization was just as virulent as the dehumanization and degradation that went with jim crow.
AP: Gautreaux could only try to deal with the public-housing piece of the problem. We focused on what seemed to be the heart of the matter–building public housing only in black neighborhoods.
Once we won in Gautreaux, a scattered-site policy emerged. The [government was] supposed to build three units in a white neighborhood for every one unit in a black neighborhood, but guess what happened? Because of the massive white flight to the suburbs, the white areas were shrinking, and because of the massive postwar building, there was less land left to develop in these areas. So the scattered-site program never became as big as we hoped. [And] there was continuing trench warfare in the courts, not to mention in the neighborhoods, which slowed the progress. We started fighting desperately to make this a remedy that included the suburbs.
