William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. was called “Bumps” by Coleman Young, Detroit’s first African-American mayor, during their stint in the military, and President Clinton honored him with a Presidential Medal of Freedom. But Coleman, or Bumps, is best remembered for his talent and tenacity as a civil rights attorney and advocate. Those memories now abound in countless obituaries. He was 96 when he died Friday, March 31, at his home in Alexandria, Va.
He had lived with his wife of 70 years, Lovida, at a care facility.
Reading Coleman’s resume is to revisit nearly every milestone of civil rights history, from his early days with Thurgood Marshall to his arguments before the Supreme Court in the 1980s.
Coleman was born July 7, 1920, in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. His father was director of a boys club for 40 years and his mother, the former Laura Mason, taught German.
The Coleman family had a long and illustrious genealogy, including one distant ancestor who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad and six generations of teachers and Episcopal ministers on his mother’s side and social workers on his father’s side.
During his formative years, Coleman was introduced to racism and experienced an incident that was very similar to one Malcolm X encountered. After a remarkable presentation in the 10th grade, he was told by his white teacher that one day “you will make a wonderful chauffeur.” When Malcolm was told by his teacher not to aspire to becoming a lawyer but resign himself to being a carpenter, it turned him away from school. Coleman was a little more outspoken and cursed his teacher and was suspended.
Coleman was suspended a second time after he sought to join the school’s all-white swim team. After his suspension was lifted, he recounted in his memoir, “Counsel for the Situation: Shaping the Law to Realize America’s Promise” (2010), the team disbanded rather than admit him. It regrouped after his graduation.
At the University of Pennsylvania, Coleman was a superb student, graduating summa cum laude with a double major in political science and economics in 1941. Two years later, after being accepted into Harvard Law School, he joined the Army Air Corps, at the time questioning himself why he was going off to fight for freedom and liberty when racial segregation was so rampant in the U.S.?
His basic training began in Mississippi with the African-American pilots, many of whom would be among the legendary Tuskegee Airmen. Like his fellow soldier, Coleman Young, he never became a pilot. He did, however, earn a reputation defending the Black officers, including Young, who challenged the officer’s club segregation policies. While on leave from the Army, he married Lovida Mae Hardin, a native of New Orleans, who was studying for a degree in education at Boston University.
After discharge from the military in 1945, Coleman returned to law school and was accepted by the Harvard Law Review—its first Black staff member. In 1947, he was the top graduate in his class.
His first notable stop after law school was as law secretary to a federal appeals court judge in Philadelphia. The next job was even more noteworthy. In 1948, as a law clerk for Justice Felix Frankfurter, he became the first African-American to hold such a position.
Six years later he was recruited by Thurgood Marshall and was soon deeply involved in the research and writing of the legal briefs in the Brown v. Board of Education that would end segregation in public schools in 1954.
A decade later, after securing a formidable reputation as a civil rights lawyer, he was an assistant counsel to the Warren Commission during its investigation of JFK’s assassination. Here he met Gerald Ford, a fellow Republican from Michigan, and they forged a relationship.
In 1975, after becoming president when Richard Nixon resigned because of the Watergate affair, Ford appointed Coleman as the transportation secretary. He was the second African-American to hold a presidential cabinet position. Robert Weaver was secretary of HUD under President Johnson and was also a member of FDR’s “Black Cabinet.”
As head of the Transportation Department, Coleman was instrumental in several major breakthroughs, including the authorization to allow the Concorde, the supersonic passenger jet, to land at Dulles International Airport and at Kennedy International Airport in New York. The plane had been barred in part because of sonic booms. The Supreme Court overturned the ban in 1977, but by 2003 the plane was removed from service; its prohibitively high costs was the reason.
Coleman had also set aside provisions for the creation of rapid transit and subway systems in various urban areas. His old friend, Young, then mayor of Detroit, was earmarked for a sizable grant that was never realized.
The installation of airbags in cars was another major development during Coleman’s tenure in transportation. Weeks before leaving office, he announced the creation of a two-year period of testing the airbags. It was not until the early 1990s, long after he was gone, that the airbags became standard equipment.
After leaving government, Coleman was back in the courtroom, largely at the invitation of the Supreme Court, where as a “friend of the court” he argued against the revocation of an IRS policy that barred private schools from receiving federal tax benefits if they practiced racial discrimination. One of the cases involved Bob Jones University, in which Coleman disagreed with their claim that a religiously based racism gave them a right to tax benefits. “When fundamental public policy is violated, a defense of religious belief is not available,” he declared.
The court, as it had done on so many previous occasions, agreed with him.
Coleman was a lifelong Republican who into his late 70s and early 80s was still finding battles to wage against racial discrimination.
Besides his wife, he is survived by a daughter, Lovida H. Coleman Jr., a prominent Washington lawyer; two sons, William III, a former general counsel to the Army, and Hardin, a former dean of the School of Education at Boston University; and four grandsons.
