Obituary: Will Maslow, 99, Pioneer in Fight for Civil Rights

From Forward.com:

Will Maslow, a prominent civil rights attorney who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress, died February 23 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

In an era when the Jewish community relied on largely quiet, nonconfrontational tactics in the fight against discrimination, Maslow was a pioneer in the use of the law as a tool in the struggle for equality. He was one of the people who helped shape [the strategy of] law as an instrument of social change...

After working as a trial attorney at the National Labor Relations Board, Maslow was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1943 to be the field director of his Fair Employment Practices Committee, a group that had been created at the behest of black union leader A. Philip Randolph. Maslow filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which desegregated American schools, and in 1963 he was one of only seven members of the administrative team that organized the historic March on Washington, at which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. He forged alliances with groups like the ACLU on the theory that, at least with regard to civil rights, Jewish interests would be advanced in tandem with the general interest...