When asked for a word to describe his father, Daniel Polikoff lands on “selfless.”

His father, Alexander Polikoff, was a lawyer and author who devoted his life to fighting for social justice. The pinnacle of his career was the more than five decades of work he performed as lead attorney in the long-running court case of Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority — one of the most important public housing desegregation cases in the country’s history that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Dorothy Gautreaux, along with other Black tenants in public housing, filed the class-action lawsuit in 1966, alleging the CHA chose public housing sites and assigned tenants by race.

It wasn’t settled until 2019, and an amendment to that settlement was approved by a judge last year, requiring the CHA to addres

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