[1] He also became known for his appellate work for Odell Waller in 1942 and the Martinsville Seven in 1950-1951, and as a partner with Oliver Hill and future federal judge Spottswood Robinson in a law firm which assisted the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in civil rights litigation in Virginia.

His general practice included representing the Danville Savings Bank (the state's oldest black-owned financial institution), as well as black teachers in salary equalization lawsuits.

[6] Martin first became involved in a nationally prominent case in September 1941, after the conviction of black sharecropper Odell Waller for killing a white landlord in Gretna, Virginia.

However, the local judge who convicted Waller allegedly instructed the court clerk to deny Martin access to further records, so that he could not show all Pittsylvania County juries were similarly selected.

[10] In the fall of 1960, two African American pupils were admitted to Chandler Elementary School, over a year after decisions by a three judge federal panel and the Virginia Supreme Court on Robert E. Lee's birthday (but in other cases litigated by the law firm) declared most of the Stanley Plan implementing Massive Resistance unconstitutional as defying the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Brown v. Board of Education.

The sentencing disparity arguments Martin had raised received additional impetus from Justice Arthur Goldberg's dissent from a denial of certiorari in Rudolph v. Alabama (1963), but was not addressed by the Supreme Court until McClesky v. Kemp (1987), when it was rejected in a case involving the killing of a white police officer.

In 1992, in a program entitled "Salute to Unsung Heroes," Martin was posthumously inducted into the Virginia Civil Rights Hall of Fame, along with his then-living partner Oliver Hill, Virginia NAACP secretary W. Lester Banks, and others including Samuel Tucker, Justice Thurgood Marshall and the 33 student plaintiffs from the Prince Edward County school desegregation lawsuit.