Pollak, U.S. judge who helped civil rights, dies at 89

Louis Pollak, a federal judge who helped work on the pivotal school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, has died. He was 89.

Pollak, a U.S. district judge, died Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia’s West Mount Airy neighborhood, according to the federal district court.
Born in New York City on Dec. 7, 1922, Pollak graduated from Harvard University in 1943 and Yale Law School in 1948. He was dean at Yale before moving to the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he also was dean.

Pollak and William T. Coleman worked with Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in writing briefs about school desegregation cases that culminated in the 1954 ruling that said state laws requiring separate public schools for black and white students was unconstitutional.