The Gautreaux Digital Archive

What brings a medieval historian to BPI? I have been asked this question numerous times over the last few months. The answer is BPI’s Alan Saks Public Interest Internship program, which has provided me with the invaluable opportunity to apply my academic skills and training in history to an important public interest project that has great immediacy today.

My Saks internship began only a few days after I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. While carrying out research for my dissertation, I had developed a great deal of knowledge about archives and digital asset management, which I was ready to apply to a new project. Rather than spending my days sifting through fifteenth-century manuscripts in European libraries, I now find myself engrossed in building and maintaining a new digital archive for BPI’s records on the historic Gautreaux public housing de-segregation lawsuit.

Over the coming months, the BPI blog will have a series of posts that examine some of the more important moments in the history of the Gautreaux litigation and provide an in-depth look at why this landmark civil rights case still matters today.  –Torsten K. Edstam, Ph.D.

The Gautreaux case began in August 1966 when BPI’s Alexander Polikoff, then acting as a pro bono attorney for the ACLU, filed class-action lawsuits against CHA and HUD on behalf of a group of public housing residents. According to many, the Gautreaux case is one of the two most significant civil rights lawsuits of the 20th century. Since the already immense store of Gautreaux papers continues to multiply, BPI has undertaken a new archival project to digitize and catalog the extensive case record. This electronic archive will preserve these historical documents and make them more accessible than ever before.

Why are these documents so important that they need to be preserved digitally? To answer that question, it is necessary to consider the historical impact of the litigation and its continuing effect on public housing in Chicago today.

There are two aspects to the historical importance of Gautreaux. The first is that Gautreaux focused attention on the responsibility of the government for racial segregation in subsidized housing programs, the first major housing case to do so. The second is that in its remedial phase Gautreaux spawned “housing mobility,” one of the more effective approaches to redressing the ills of racial residential segregation.

Today, nearly fifty years later, Gautreaux remains an active litigation. Gautreaux orders play an important role in shaping the public housing portion of Chicago’s “Plan for Transformation” that seeks to replace segregated public housing high-rises with mixed-income communities. Moreover, CHA’s development plans remain subject to Gautreaux orders as BPI lawyers continue to advocate for improved housing options in neighborhoods of opportunity. Given the continuing importance of Gautreaux, it is no surprise that the case record now contains hundreds of documents that are regularly used by BPI’s legal team and researchers.

The digitization project will preserve the rapidly deteriorating paper files from the case and facilitate readier access through a new knowledge management system. The project involves a multi-stage process in which the documents in the case record are first organized chronologically and then scanned. Next, optical character recognition is applied to each file to increase accessibility. Finally, all of the documents are cataloged with appropriate metadata in order to facilitate searching and identification.

For the first time, users will be able search through all of the case files in one place and locate specific materials at the click of a mouse. This new Gautreaux digital archive will not only benefit BPI attorneys working on the case, but it will also be a valuable resource for advocates, students, researchers, journalists, and academics interested in Gautreaux.