As a “senior citizen” myself, most of my older friends and mentors are dwindling away. On Tuesday evening, May 27, a longtime role model and friend, Alexander Polikoff, passed away peacefully in Keene, New Hampshire at the age of 98 with his family at his side. Although I saw more of Alex at our monthly lunch and conversation visits over the past three years than previously, I have known and admired him as a brilliant and tenacious civil rights lawyer since my early career as a fledgling environmental lawyer working in downtown Chicago in the late 1960s, near his public interest law firm.

Chicago at that time was famously embroiled in social and political upheaval — the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the environmental movement. These swept the city, with a whirlwind of historic events including the MLK freedom marches in white neighborhoods, the turbulent 1968 Democratic National Convention, the “Chicago Seven” trial, the first Earth Day, and various demonstrations against the war and supporting women’s rights. The Loop also hosted a huge parade to honor the first astronauts to land on the Moon on July 16, 1969 (shortly before our daughter Anne was born!)

Amid this background of social unrest and activism, Alex launched what would become his signature contribution to the campaign for civil rights in Chicago and the nation. On Aug. 9, 1966, just a month after Dr. King began his Chicago freedom marches with a demand upon Mayor Richard J. Daley to end discrimination in housing, Alex and his legal team filed their initial petition with the Federal District Court in what would become the epic litigation known as “Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority.” Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision “Brown v. Board of Education,” lawyers for the plaintiffs under Alex’s guidance claimed that the city of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development were providing public housing units for Black families only in segregated Black neighborhoods, and mostly in dangerous high-rise tenements, in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

“Gautreaux” would consume much of the the next five decades of Alex’s legal career, as it ricocheted among federal courts, including a 1976 appeal by the city to the U.S. Supreme Court which he argued personally on behalf of the plaintiffs, winning an 8-0 decision of the court. But as the city continued to balk, the case ground on and on, and so did Alex.

Meanwhile, I was an avid onlooker and collector of xerox copies of each Gautreaux decision. Even after our family left Chicago for bucolic western Massachusetts, my wife Connie would periodically nudge me to write a book to be entitled: “Waiting For Gautreaux.” To my relief, Alex beat me to it: his personal memoir — in fact titled “Waiting for Gautreaux” — was published by Northwestern University Press in 2006. It is a fundamental record of the struggle to desegregate public housing in Chicago and nationally, while simultaneously seeking to open up white neighborhoods and suburbs to nonwhite households.

After retiring from UMass Amherst, I became intrigued with the extraordinary history of Jane Addams and her network of progressive reformers associated with Hull-House, which she co-founded in 1889 amid immigrant neighborhoods in Chicago. Among her countless disciples were Dr. Alice Hamilton, Florence Kelley, Clarence Darrow, Walter Lippman, Senator Paul Douglas, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mount Holyoke College graduate Frances Perkins, the architect of Social Security as FDR’s secretary of labor (and first woman cabinet member).

Beginning around 2012, I returned to Chicago to talk with people familiar with or carrying on the many legacies of Hull-House. This led me back to Alex Polikoff and his wife Barbara, the author of “With One Bold Act” based on memoirs of her aunt and uncle as artists-in-residence at Hull House in its heyday. Despite encouragement from both Polikoffs and other Chicago friends, my plan to hold a Jane Addams public symposium in Chicago became unfeasible. Instead, I and several allies organized a forum at Edwards Church in Northampton in 2017: “Rediscovering Jane Addams in a Time of Crisis.” (A sequel to that program will be a public forum on today’s immigration crisis at First Churches on Sept. 13.)

Alex and Barbara moved from Highland Park, Illinois to an assisted living facility in Keene in 2020 to be near family members, but Barbara sadly passed away soon thereafter. I reconnected with Alex in 2022, and thus began my monthly drive up to Keene for lunch and great talk. He served as my “senior counsel” in reviewing my written efforts to challenge Picture Main Street and the city’s purchase of the former Baptist Church. In his “spare time,” Alex wrote “Cry My Beloved America: A Call to Action,” a collection of essays deploring corporate take-over of American democracy, published by Levellers Press in 2024.

On our last visit in early May when he was under hospice care, Alex asked for an update on downtown Northampton. With his encouraging questions still ringing in my ears, I knew that would be our last conversation. What a great humanitarian and friend he was.

Rutherford H. Platt is a resident of Florence and an emeritus professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.