Attorney Robert Howard was called one of “the lawyers who reformed Chicago.”

Mr. Howard used the law to fight police spying, help desegregate schools, and empower African-American police officers. He also campaigned for the election of two African-American “firsts”: Chicago Mayor Harold Washington and President Barack Obama.

Political consultant Don Rose included Mr. Howard among the “The Lawyers Who Reformed Chicago” in a 2011 analysis he wrote for www.theweekbehind.com. Mr. Howard and two other attorneys filed suit around 1974 to investigate illegal police spying in what became known as the “Red Squad” case.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, opposition to the Vietnam War — and the push for civil rights and other causes — created a cultural upheaval. Some Chicago Police officers infiltrated groups that were deemed subversive, but often were composed of social-justice activists or organizations unfriendly to Mayor Richard J. Daley. The police intelligence squad — known as the Red Squad — amassed thousands of files on people and associations. Sometimes, the squad used rumors to try to destabilize so-called anti-establishment groups. Surveillance targets included author Studs Terkel; Aldermen Leon Despres and Dick Simpson; Dr. Quentin Young, the head of medicine at Cook County Hospital; Chicago Defender Publisher John Sengstacke; Clergy and Laity Concerned; the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago; the Organization for a Better Austin, and Operation PUSH.

It took 11 years, said Rose, who was a party to the suit, but in 1985, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner ordered the city to pay people and associations who said they were spied on.

“I think he was most proud of his work around really strengthening Democratic values, which is what that political spying was all about,” said his wife, Barbara Y. Phillips. “You cannot have a democracy when citizens were intimidated.”

Later in his career, Mr. Howard sued school districts in Rockford and Elgin to seek better education for Latino and African-American children, his wife said.

He died Friday at 70 at Northwestern Memorial Hospital from complications of Huntington’s disease.

Read the full obituary in the Chicago Sun-Times