Former Transportation Secretary William T. Coleman, Jr., center, sits next to his daugher, Lovida H. Coleman, Jr., as they are interviewed by Grand Rapids attorney John Smietanka.
LEGAL NEWS PHOTO BY CYNTHIA PRICE
by Cynthia Price
Legal News
At the ripe old age of 90, attorney William T. Coleman has a sharp wit and an excellent memory for the important events of his life.
And so many of his personal events are significant in the history of the United States as well.
There may be details that escape him, but rest assured that they are the trivial ones, not those that shaped U.S. society.
Coleman was not only a public servant who worked on a variety of presidential commissions in the 1950s and 1960s, and not only the Secretary of Transportation during Gerald Ford’s presidency, but also a skilled attorney who participated in some of the most telling legal decisions shaping the civil rights struggle.
He had a distinguished career in and out of the public eye, and went on to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995 by President William Clinton, the highest civilian honor the United States gives.
Coleman, who has recently released his book Counsel for the Situation: Shaping the Law to Realize America’s Promise, addressed a group at the Gerald R. Ford Museum on March 31 as part of its speaker series.
Because he is subject to the same infirmities as any other aging person such as inability to hear well and occasional muffled speech, Coleman brought his daughter Lovida H. Coleman, Jr., to help him.
Lovida Coleman, who sports a “Junior” because she has the exact same name as her mother, is also a noted attorney who has worked in government and in private practice.
Prompted by questions from the panel moderator, John Smietanka — himself a former public servant, U.S. Attorney for the Western Michigan District from 1981-1994 — William Coleman talked about his early life. Smietanka asked him about the Germantown boys club his father had run in Philadelphia, which apparently attracted African-American celebrities such as Bill Cosby and Wilt Chamberlain, and wondered who else Coleman had met as a child. Coleman responded, “Well, that’s a long time ago, I can’t remember all of them,”
But it was clear from his detailed re-creation of past events that Mr. Coleman’s mind was not one of the infirmities Lovida was there to help address. In fact, he sometimes made humorous rejoinders when she intervened in the conversation, and the two sparred affectionately.
As they were discussing Coleman’s first “first,” when as law clerk for Felix Frankfurter he became the first African-American law clerk to a Supreme Court justice, Coleman referred to it as “one of the best years of my life.” Ms. Coleman commented,“I was born that year I might add.” Coleman replied calmly,“It just proves that your father can do more than one thing at a time.”
Coleman had graduated first in his class at Harvard Law School and was the first person of color to be an editor of the Harvard Law Review. When it was discovered that Coleman had not received Harvard’s traditional Fay Diploma for earning the highest combined average in his class (he graduated first in the class of 1946), it was Elena Kagan who conferred him with the diploma. Kagan, now a Supreme Court Justice, was then Dean of Harvard Law School.
Coleman came into contact with a series of famous people who joined him in shaping the United States of the 1970s and 1980s. Serving with him as clerk to Felix Frankfurter was fellow Harvard graduate (of 1947) Elliot Richardson, who later held a number of cabinet posts and was Attorney General during the Watergate scandal.
Coleman said that he and Richardson would join Justice Frankfurter early in the morning and “give him a briefing on public policy” before the Supreme Court opened at noon.
Coleman had already made a difference in discrimination law, even before he was an attorney, in fact. When he volunteered to be in the Army while still at Harvard, he defended members of the famous African-American Tuskegee Airmen who had been court-martialed after they tried to get into an officers’ club. Coleman was able to try the case and got them all acquitted. “As pilots, they agreed to be shot at and maybe killed [for their country], and then they tried to go to the officers’ club and they couldn’t — that was very shocking to me,” he said.
After clerking for Justice Frankfurter, Coleman was no stranger to the Supreme Court. He was a lead strategist on the seminal and co-wrote the legal brief on the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, where the Supreme Court held that public school segregation was unconstitutional.
On that case he worked alongside Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first African-American to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Marshall was one of a circle of civil rights litigators from that time who Coleman said were great lawyers and great people.
Of Marshall, Coleman said, “I originally got to know him because he was born in Baltimore and lived right next to where my mom lived before she got married.” When they started arguing Brown v. Board of Education , Coleman said, “My name couldn’t be on the brief, I couldn’t sit beside him, because I’d been a law clerk less than 2 years before. After that, I worked with Marshall for a year, was eligible to argue it the second year and we won it.”
Other society-changing cases Coleman noted included Bob Jones University v. United States, the 1983 case which affirmed revocation of that university’s tax exemption because it discriminated racially. He worked as part of the legal team on a similar case regarding Girard College in Philadelphia. The college’s benefactor had willed the college to city administration to provide for “white males six to eighteen.” The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the Brown decision superseded the will, and African-Americans enrolled in 1968.
Coleman was frequently asked to serve on presidential commissions, and probably the most famous was the Warren Commission on President Kennedy’s assassination.
It was there that Coleman met then-Representative Gerald R. Ford. He told the audience that he was impressed with Ford’s diligence on the commission, and later found him to be “an excellent president.”
Coleman accepted Ford’s invitation to be the Secretary of Transportation in 1975, making him only the second African-American to serve in the Cabinet. Among his accomplishments in that job were development of the first Statement of National Transportation Policy and establishment of the Materials Transportation Bureau to address hazardous material shipment and pipeline safety. He also created the Metro, Washington D.C.’s subway service.
One of the controversial decisions Coleman had to make was whether to allow the supersonic passenger airliner Concorde to land in the U.S. During the panel discussion he pointed to his lapel and said, “This little red thing I have here is what the French gave me because I let the Concorde land here – they were very grateful.”
In 1997, events came full circle when Coleman received the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award.
Coleman is still Of Counsel at the Washington D.C. office of prestigious law firm O'Melveny and Myers.
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