By John Payton

The death on February 28 of Theodore Lamont Cross deprives the world and American society and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. of an extraordinary counselor and friend.

Ted Cross was a man whose brilliant intellect, astute mind for business and seemingly boundless energy led him to remarkable achievements in several different careers—as a corporate attorney, an entrepreneur and investor, a publisher, and an acclaimed photographer of waterbirds.

Fortunately, for LDF and American society as a whole, Ted Cross also possessed a fervent commitment to social justice. That first surfaced in ways that many others would notice in the early 1960s when he was general counsel for the Sheraton hotels corporation. The company dispatched him from its New York headquarters to San Francisco to forestall a sit-in protesting alleged racially-discriminatory practices at its Palace Hotel. His investigation, he said later, led him to conclude that “I was working on the wrong side for the wrong people.”

Soon, Cross had immersed himself in civil rights issues, joining one of the three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in the spring of 1965 that underscored the need for passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act that year, working on anti-poverty issues in administration of Lyndon Baines Johnson, and undertaking the research that would result in his highly-influential exploration of the economic privation of black ghettos, Black Capitalism: Strategy for Business in the Ghetto.

A later book, The Black Power Imperative: Racial Inequality and the Politics of Nonviolence, bespoke his continuing concern with enhancing the economic foundation for black advancement. That concern led to his founding in 1993 The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which immediately became an indispensable source of statistics, information and commentary on the status of blacks in higher education.

Ted also served on the LDF Board of Directors from 1989 to 1999, and since then continued to be significantly involved in marshalling support for LDF’s activities. The LDF staff joins with Ted Cross’s many admirers in mourning his passing.

John Payton is President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc.