Coleman, William T(haddeus), Jr.

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Coleman, William T(haddeus), Jr.

1920–
African American civil rights lawyer and secretary of transportation in the administration of President Gerald Ford.

Born into a comfortable family in Germantown, Pennsylvania, William T. Coleman, Jr., graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1941, and ranked first in his class when he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1946. He was the first African American to clerk for a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, serving under Felix Frankfurter from 1948 to 1949. Coleman worked in private practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, becoming the first African American to join an established white law firm in that city. Deeply committed to civil rights, Coleman coauthored the brief in the challenge to legalized school segregation in the landmark desegregation case before the Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Entering public life in 1965, Coleman was appointed by Pennsylvania governor William Scranton to participate in the ultimately successful attempt to desegregate Girard College, a richly endowed orphans' home and school in Philadelphia. In 1969 Coleman served as a United States delegate to the United Nations. In 1971 he was elected chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund. He declined federal appointments during the early 1970s, including the position of special prosecutor for the Watergate scandal under President Richard Nixon. He accepted, however, when President Gerald Ford named him secretary of transportation in 1975. Coleman became the second African American to serve in a cabinet post, preceded by Robert Weaver, President Lyndon Johnson's secretary of housing and urban development.

Following his government service, Coleman returned to private practice and joined the boards of directors of prominent corporations such as International Business Machines (IBM), Chase Manhattan, and Pan American World Airways. In 1982, after the administration of President Ronald Reagan abandoned its case against the tax-exempt status of schools that racially discriminate in Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), the Supreme Court took the unusual step of inviting Coleman to argue the administration's position. The court ultimately ruled in Coleman's favor.

In 1995 President Bill Clinton awarded Coleman the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation read, in part, “Holding fast to his conviction that equal access to the American dream is a right of all our citizens, William Coleman has endeavored throughout his life to close the gap between the ideals enshrined in our Constitution and the reality of our daily lives.” Coleman also received the Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Urban League's Equal Opportunity Award. In 2000 he was awarded the American Law Institute's Henry J. Friendly Medal for outstanding contributions to the law. Coleman currently works as a partner at the law firm of O'Melveny and Myers.

See also Law and Legal Cases.

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