In Memoriam: William T. Coleman Jr.

Mr. Coleman addresses ALI membership after receiving the Henry J. Friendly Medal in 2000.

William T. Coleman, Jr., an adviser to several Presidents, who served as Secretary of Transportation during the Ford Administration, died at his home in Alexandria, Virginia, on March 31. He was 96.

A senior partner and the Senior Counselor of the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers in its Washington, DC, office, Mr. Coleman was a main architect of the legal strategy leading to Brown v. Board of Education and the desegregation of schools and other public facilities throughout the United States, and he played a leading role for almost 70 years in the effort to give reality to the principle of equality under law.

Born in Philadelphia in 1920, Mr. Coleman attended then-predominately white Germantown High School, where the swim team was disbanded when he sought to try out for it, and where teachers suggested his good grades might lead to a career as a chauffeur. Instead, he received his undergraduate degree, summa cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard University, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated first in his class. Following graduation, he was a law clerk for Judge Herbert Goodrich of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, who was then the ALI’s Director. In 1948, he became the U.S. Supreme Court’s first African American law clerk when he clerked for Justice Felix Frankfurter. Mr. Coleman practiced law at the prominent firms of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York and Dilworth, Paxson, Kalish, Levy & Coleman in Philadelphia until his Cabinet appointment in 1975. Previously he had served as a member of the President’s Committee on Government Employment Policy from 1959 to 1961, as Assistant Counsel to the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy in 1964, and as both Legal Adviser for the Council on Environmental Quality and member of the President’s National Commission on Productivity in 1970. He joined O’Melveny & Myers in 1977.

In 1971, Mr. Coleman became President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later served as its Chair. He received the Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. In 1995, President Bill Clinton conferred on Mr. Coleman the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of his many years of public service.  A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, he was the recipient of numerous other honors, including the 2013 Harvard Medal given by the Harvard Alumni Association for his extraordinary service to the university.

Mr. Coleman was a member of ALI since 1963 and of its Council since 1969, taking Council Emeritus status in 2008. In 2000, the Institute presented to him its most prestigious award, the Henry J. Friendly Medal, for his outstanding contributions to the law in the tradition of the late Judge Friendly and the Institute. Two of his three children, Lovida H. Coleman, Jr., and William T. Coleman III, are also lawyers and ALI members, and the third, Hardin L. Coleman, is the dean of the Boston University School of Education. His wife is the former Lovida Hardin of New Orleans.

Read the NY Times obituary [subscription may be required].