That Derek
2017-04-01 13:02:33 UTC
http://www.phillytrib.com/news/william-thaddeus-coleman-jr-dead-at/article_76a483a2-4d3a-5c69-91ec-0eba8feda9e2.html
featured
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. dead at 97 [sic]
Daryl Bell Tribune Staff Writer
8 hrs ago
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., a Philadelphia native who championed the cause of civil rights in milestone cases before the Supreme Court and who rose above racial barriers to become an influential lawyer and serve as a Cabinet secretary, died Friday, March 31, 2017, at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 96.
A spokeswoman for the international law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where Coleman was a senior partner in its Washington office, confirmed his death. He lived at a care facility with his wife of more than 70 years, Lovida.
A lifelong Republican, Coleman was as comfortable in the boardrooms of powerful corporations — PepsiCo, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank — as he was in the halls of government. He was the second African-American to serve in a White House cabinet, heading the Department of Transportation.
He was born on July 7, 1920, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, the second of three children of the late Laura Mason and William T. Coleman Sr. His father was the director of a boys club for 40 years and his mother taught German.
The family came from six generations of teachers and Episcopal ministers on his mother’s side, one of whom operated the Underground Railroad in St. Louis, helping slaves flee their masters, and many social workers on his father’s side. Civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois and poet Langston Hughes would go to dinner at the Coleman home.
Coleman attended a segregated elementary school and was one of just seven Black students at Germantown High School, one of Philadelphia’s best at the time. But he experienced racism there. In a memoir, “Counsel for the Situation: Shaping the Law to Realize America’s Promise,” Coleman recalled giving a well-received oral presentation in an English class as a 10th-grade honors student.
After the presentation, his teacher, who was white, said, “Someday, William, you will make a wonderful chauffeur.”
Coleman wrote that the teacher “had intended to compliment the poised oral presentation” he had made. “Yet somehow I didn’t take it that way,” he wrote. He recalled being suspended for cursing the teacher.
Another suspension he wrote came when he demanded to join the Germantown High School swimming team which was all-white swim team. After the suspension was lifted, he said, the team disbanded rather than admit him. It regrouped after he graduated.
With a strong recommendation from the swim team coach, Coleman went to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude with a double major, political science and economics, in 1941.
He was accepted into the Harvard School of Law but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army Air Corps, though not before asking himself, as he put it, “whether it made sense to fight for freedom and liberty in Europe and Asia when racial segregation was still so rampant in the United States.”
He trained in Mississippi with Black aviators who earned fame as the Tuskegee Airmen, though he failed to become a fighter pilot himself. He spent part of his service as a defense team member in court-martial proceedings, and in one case helped defend Black airmen who had been arrested for challenging segregation at an officers’ club.
Coleman returned to the law school after military service ended in 1945, was accepted by The Harvard Law Review — he was its first Black staff member — and graduated first in his class in 1947.
While on leave from the Army in 1945, he married Lovida Mae Hardin, a New Orleans native he had met when she was studying for a degree in education at Boston University.
Those experiences would inform his efforts in three major civil rights cases before the United States Supreme Court.
In one case, Coleman, recruited by Thurgood Marshall, was an author of the legal briefs that successfully pressed the court to outlaw segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Ten years later, he argued a case that led to a Supreme Court decision establishing the constitutionality of racially mixed sexual relations and cohabitation. And in 1982, he argued that segregated private schools should be barred from receiving federal tax exemptions. The court agreed.
Coleman was appointed transportation secretary by President Gerald R. Ford in March 1975, a little more than six months after Ford, who had been vice president, succeeded President Richard M. Nixon after Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate affair. Coleman, a corporate lawyer with expertise in transportation issues, was on the Pan Am board of directors at the time.
He and Ford became friends in 1964 when Coleman was an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission during its investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ford, then a Republican congressman from Michigan, was a commission member.
Coleman was the second African American to hold a Cabinet post, following Robert C. Weaver who served as housing secretary in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He oversaw a Transportation Department, confronting rapid advances in the aviation industry and increasing demands for public safety on the roads. In May 1976, he authorized a 16-month testing period allowing the Concorde, the needle-nose supersonic British- and French-made commercial jet, to land at Dulles International Airport near Washington and Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had barred Concorde jets from landing at Kennedy, in part because of concerns about sonic booms. But the Supreme Court overturned the ban in October 1977. The jets crisscrossed the Atlantic daily until 2003, when they were taken out of service largely because of a lack of customers willing to pay $12,000 or more for a round-trip ticket.
In December 1976, weeks before leaving office, Coleman announced that the auto industry would conduct a two-year demonstration of the practicality of installing airbags in automobiles. The limited testing was hailed by the industry, but it disappointed consumer groups and the insurance industry, which had urged Coleman to end seven years of government indecision and order the device on all autos. Airbags became standard equipment only in the early 1990s.
Coleman served until the end of the Ford administration, in 1977, then re-entered the public arena in 1982 at the Supreme Court’s invitation.
At issue was an effort by the Reagan administration to revoke an Internal Revenue Service policy that barred racially discriminatory private schools from receiving federal tax benefits. The court named Mr. Coleman a “friend of the court” to argue against revocation.
The case, Bob Jones University v. United States, involved tax exemptions that had been granted to Bob Jones, a fundamentalist Protestant institution in Greenville, S.C., and to Goldsboro Christian Schools in Goldsboro, N.C. The plaintiffs argued that their segregation policies were based on biblical injunctions against the mixing of races.
Coleman would have none of it.
“Their argument is that because their racism is religiously based, they have a right to tax benefits denied to all others who cannot defend their policies on religious grounds,” he told the court. “When fundamental public policy is violated, a defense of religious belief is not available.”
The court affirmed his position on May 25, 1983, with an 8-1 decision written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Justice William H. Rehnquist, later the chief justice, was the lone dissenter.
Almost 20 years earlier, Coleman was co-counsel in McLaughlin v. Florida, in which the Supreme Court overturned a Florida law that prohibited an interracial couple from living together under the state’s anti-miscegenation statutes. The couple had been convicted after choosing to live together despite the law.
In a unanimous decision on Dec. 7, 1964, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “It is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.”
Three years later, in Loving v. Virginia, the court unanimously declared all race-based legal restrictions on marriage unconstitutional.
In 1951, Marshall, who was then chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, asked Mr. Coleman to join the legal team preparing the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education.
Those arguments contributed to the court’s unanimous declaration that state laws that established separate schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional.
Coleman was named president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1971 and was its chairman from 1977 to 1997. He argued 19 cases before the Supreme Court.
Coleman twice turned down offers for federal judgeships, from Presidents Johnson and Nixon. He was co-chairman of the White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966. In 1995, President Bill Clinton presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Besides his wife, he is survived by: a daughter, Lovida H. Coleman, a prominent Washington lawyer; two sons, William III, a former general counsel to the U.S. Army, and Hardin, a former dean of the School of Education at Boston University; and four grandsons.
featured
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. dead at 97 [sic]
Daryl Bell Tribune Staff Writer
8 hrs ago
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., a Philadelphia native who championed the cause of civil rights in milestone cases before the Supreme Court and who rose above racial barriers to become an influential lawyer and serve as a Cabinet secretary, died Friday, March 31, 2017, at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 96.
A spokeswoman for the international law firm O’Melveny & Myers, where Coleman was a senior partner in its Washington office, confirmed his death. He lived at a care facility with his wife of more than 70 years, Lovida.
A lifelong Republican, Coleman was as comfortable in the boardrooms of powerful corporations — PepsiCo, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank — as he was in the halls of government. He was the second African-American to serve in a White House cabinet, heading the Department of Transportation.
He was born on July 7, 1920, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, the second of three children of the late Laura Mason and William T. Coleman Sr. His father was the director of a boys club for 40 years and his mother taught German.
The family came from six generations of teachers and Episcopal ministers on his mother’s side, one of whom operated the Underground Railroad in St. Louis, helping slaves flee their masters, and many social workers on his father’s side. Civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois and poet Langston Hughes would go to dinner at the Coleman home.
Coleman attended a segregated elementary school and was one of just seven Black students at Germantown High School, one of Philadelphia’s best at the time. But he experienced racism there. In a memoir, “Counsel for the Situation: Shaping the Law to Realize America’s Promise,” Coleman recalled giving a well-received oral presentation in an English class as a 10th-grade honors student.
After the presentation, his teacher, who was white, said, “Someday, William, you will make a wonderful chauffeur.”
Coleman wrote that the teacher “had intended to compliment the poised oral presentation” he had made. “Yet somehow I didn’t take it that way,” he wrote. He recalled being suspended for cursing the teacher.
Another suspension he wrote came when he demanded to join the Germantown High School swimming team which was all-white swim team. After the suspension was lifted, he said, the team disbanded rather than admit him. It regrouped after he graduated.
With a strong recommendation from the swim team coach, Coleman went to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated summa cum laude with a double major, political science and economics, in 1941.
He was accepted into the Harvard School of Law but left in 1943 to enlist in the Army Air Corps, though not before asking himself, as he put it, “whether it made sense to fight for freedom and liberty in Europe and Asia when racial segregation was still so rampant in the United States.”
He trained in Mississippi with Black aviators who earned fame as the Tuskegee Airmen, though he failed to become a fighter pilot himself. He spent part of his service as a defense team member in court-martial proceedings, and in one case helped defend Black airmen who had been arrested for challenging segregation at an officers’ club.
Coleman returned to the law school after military service ended in 1945, was accepted by The Harvard Law Review — he was its first Black staff member — and graduated first in his class in 1947.
While on leave from the Army in 1945, he married Lovida Mae Hardin, a New Orleans native he had met when she was studying for a degree in education at Boston University.
Those experiences would inform his efforts in three major civil rights cases before the United States Supreme Court.
In one case, Coleman, recruited by Thurgood Marshall, was an author of the legal briefs that successfully pressed the court to outlaw segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Ten years later, he argued a case that led to a Supreme Court decision establishing the constitutionality of racially mixed sexual relations and cohabitation. And in 1982, he argued that segregated private schools should be barred from receiving federal tax exemptions. The court agreed.
Coleman was appointed transportation secretary by President Gerald R. Ford in March 1975, a little more than six months after Ford, who had been vice president, succeeded President Richard M. Nixon after Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate affair. Coleman, a corporate lawyer with expertise in transportation issues, was on the Pan Am board of directors at the time.
He and Ford became friends in 1964 when Coleman was an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission during its investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Ford, then a Republican congressman from Michigan, was a commission member.
Coleman was the second African American to hold a Cabinet post, following Robert C. Weaver who served as housing secretary in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. He oversaw a Transportation Department, confronting rapid advances in the aviation industry and increasing demands for public safety on the roads. In May 1976, he authorized a 16-month testing period allowing the Concorde, the needle-nose supersonic British- and French-made commercial jet, to land at Dulles International Airport near Washington and Kennedy International Airport in New York.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had barred Concorde jets from landing at Kennedy, in part because of concerns about sonic booms. But the Supreme Court overturned the ban in October 1977. The jets crisscrossed the Atlantic daily until 2003, when they were taken out of service largely because of a lack of customers willing to pay $12,000 or more for a round-trip ticket.
In December 1976, weeks before leaving office, Coleman announced that the auto industry would conduct a two-year demonstration of the practicality of installing airbags in automobiles. The limited testing was hailed by the industry, but it disappointed consumer groups and the insurance industry, which had urged Coleman to end seven years of government indecision and order the device on all autos. Airbags became standard equipment only in the early 1990s.
Coleman served until the end of the Ford administration, in 1977, then re-entered the public arena in 1982 at the Supreme Court’s invitation.
At issue was an effort by the Reagan administration to revoke an Internal Revenue Service policy that barred racially discriminatory private schools from receiving federal tax benefits. The court named Mr. Coleman a “friend of the court” to argue against revocation.
The case, Bob Jones University v. United States, involved tax exemptions that had been granted to Bob Jones, a fundamentalist Protestant institution in Greenville, S.C., and to Goldsboro Christian Schools in Goldsboro, N.C. The plaintiffs argued that their segregation policies were based on biblical injunctions against the mixing of races.
Coleman would have none of it.
“Their argument is that because their racism is religiously based, they have a right to tax benefits denied to all others who cannot defend their policies on religious grounds,” he told the court. “When fundamental public policy is violated, a defense of religious belief is not available.”
The court affirmed his position on May 25, 1983, with an 8-1 decision written by Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Justice William H. Rehnquist, later the chief justice, was the lone dissenter.
Almost 20 years earlier, Coleman was co-counsel in McLaughlin v. Florida, in which the Supreme Court overturned a Florida law that prohibited an interracial couple from living together under the state’s anti-miscegenation statutes. The couple had been convicted after choosing to live together despite the law.
In a unanimous decision on Dec. 7, 1964, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “It is simply not possible for a state law to be valid under our Constitution which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.”
Three years later, in Loving v. Virginia, the court unanimously declared all race-based legal restrictions on marriage unconstitutional.
In 1951, Marshall, who was then chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, asked Mr. Coleman to join the legal team preparing the briefs in Brown v. Board of Education.
Those arguments contributed to the court’s unanimous declaration that state laws that established separate schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional.
Coleman was named president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 1971 and was its chairman from 1977 to 1997. He argued 19 cases before the Supreme Court.
Coleman twice turned down offers for federal judgeships, from Presidents Johnson and Nixon. He was co-chairman of the White House Conference on Civil Rights in 1966. In 1995, President Bill Clinton presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Besides his wife, he is survived by: a daughter, Lovida H. Coleman, a prominent Washington lawyer; two sons, William III, a former general counsel to the U.S. Army, and Hardin, a former dean of the School of Education at Boston University; and four grandsons.