Louis E. Martin

On Monday, January 27, 1997, Martin died in Orange, California. He was 84.

Louis Martin was a founder of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a group of black newspaper publishers. He was also (in 1970) a founder of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a research organization in Washington, D.C. providing technical support for black officeholders and scholars throughout the country; serving as its first chairman for eight years.

Following the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Martin was among the few close Kennedy advisors to successfully make the transition to the new administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. In 1967, as a trusted advisor, Martin was influential in President Johnson’s decision to nominate Thurgood Marshall as the first black Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Of his close working relationship with Johnson it was said that They talked to each other in the shorthand of experienced political pros, according to Clifford Alexander, Special White House counsel and the first African-American Secretary of the United States Army. Secretary Alexander regarded Martin as his mentor. Among the other leading black public figures whom Martin helped raise to prominence was Vernon E. Jordan Jr., later a close adviser to President Bill Clinton. Martin helped recruit Jordan to head the National Urban League.

Originally recruited by R. Sargent Shriver, Martin joined the 1960 Presidential campaign of Senator John F. Kennedy. During the campaign, Martin was instrumental in persuading candidate Kennedy to place a telephone call to Coretta Scott King to express dismay over the jailing of her husband, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That phone call was widely credited with helping Kennedy win a major portion of the black vote in the general election that year. It prompted Dr. King’s father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., a registered Republican, to vote for Democratic Presidential candidate Kennedy.

After first attending Fisk University, Martin went on to graduate from the University of Michigan in 1934, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism. Following college, Martin traveled to his father’s native Cuba, spending two years there as a freelance writer based in Havana. Returning to the United States in 1936, he was hired as a reporter with the Chicago Defender, a major black newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois.

Louis Emanuel Martin Jr. (November 18, 1912 – January 27, 1997) was an American journalist, newspaper publisher, civil rights activist and advisor to three Presidents of the United States. Through his political activism during the civil rights era, he came to be known as the “Godfather of Black Politics.”