Chicago Reader
On this date 42 years ago—February 10, 1969—federal district judge Richard B. Austin issued a ruling aimed squarely at a persistent Chicago problem. "Existing patterns of racial segregation must be reversed if there is to be a chance of averting the desperately intensifying division of whites and Negroes in Chicago," Austin wrote.
The case, Dorothy Gautreaux v. the Chicago Housing Authority, concerned the location of public housing—projects were being built only in the city's black ghettos because whites didn't want blacks in their neighborhoods. But the broader issue, as Judge Austin noted, was residential racial segregation, a matter of much concern throughout America back then...