Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

134 // NANCY J. WEISS
NAACP a check for $100 as a "thank-offering" along with a fulsome letter of congratulations
to Walter White: "The stone that the builders rejected" had become
the cornerstone of an important new guarantee of individual rights, he wrote;
"due process of law now means, not merely a right to be heard before a court, but
that it must be before a court that is not paralyzed by mob domination. " 3/1
Over the next half dozen years, Marshall threw himself into the Association's
legal work with such intensity that Kelly Miller later characterized him as "the
Attorney General for the N.A.A.C.P." Marshall took the leading role in the organization's
battle against disfranchisement and residential segregation. He plotted
strategy, drafted briefs, and—in Corrigan v. Buckley (1926), a case involving the
legality of restrictive covenants, and In Nixon v. Herndon (1927), the first of a series
of cases involving the constitutionality of white primaries in Texas—presented
oral arguments in the Supreme Court. When Marshall died unexpectedly in 1929,
he was deeply involved in developing the brief for the second Texas primary case,
Nixon v. Condon (1932). "What fretted him most" when he fell ill, a close associate
later recorded, "was that he had some work to do at home; that there was an
important case to be argued involving questions affecting the rights of the
Negroes." Marshall's son, James, took over as lead counsel in Nixon v. Condon, and
subsequently joined both the NAACP legal committee and the board. 35
For Louis Marshall, doing battle for the legal rights of Black Americans was
part and parcel of a broader commitment to ensuring the civil liberties and rights
of all minorities. He took up the cause of Socialists and pacifists, Jews and
Catholics, Indians and Japanese-Americans, aliens and immigrants. He was animated
by what one colleague described as "his passion for justice, his hatred of
wrong": "His tongue and his pen were ready in his defense of Jew or Gentile alike,
of white man or Negro, when he was called to champion their cause." But he was
also impelled by the knowledge that the rights of other minorities needed to be
secure if the rights of Jews were to be guaranteed. 36 The experience of belonging
to an oppressed minority helped to explain his commitment to racial advancement.
Addressing the annual meeting of the NAACP in 1926, Marshall made the
connection explicitly: "I belong to an ancient race which has had even longer
experience of oppression than you have....We were subjected to indignities in
comparison with which to sit m a 'Jim Crow' car is to occupy a palace." At the
time of Marshall's death, Alfred Segal, the president of B'nai B'rith, wrote that
being a Jew was "no narrow identity to him; it had to do with all the duties at
the common altar. To be a Jew was to be a servant of mankind: to champion the
Negro against discrimination." In a memorial tribute, Marshall's close associate,
Cyrus Adler, commented along the same lines: "It may be, because he was a Jew
and was aware of the oppression to which minorities are subject, that he took up
the cause of the Negro." 3 '
Marshall's death came, by coincidence, within months of Moorfield Storey's.
Walter White observed of their passing: "It is going to be almost impossible to
replace these two men who were our greatest legal assets as well as immensely