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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
William T. Coleman, Jr.
1920-
Nationality: American
Occupation: Lawyer, Executives, Government official
INTRODUCTION
Born in a nation with both unwritten rules and codified laws that prevented blacks from achieving their potential, William T. Coleman broke those rules and helped tear out those laws during a life defined by the word "achievement." Coleman's resume is sprinkled with firsts in the legal, corporate, and government sectors. Through strength of character, this man of great intellect and judgment reached his potential. His many accomplishments were acknowledged by President Bill Clinton when he awarded Coleman the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995.
PERSONAL
Addresses: Current address: c/o O'Melveny and Myers, 555 12th Street, NW, Suite 500W, Washington, DC 20004--1109.
NARRATIVE ESSAY:
William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. was born in the Germantown district of Philadelphia on July 7, 1920. He was the second of three children born to William Thaddeus and Laura Beatrice Mason Coleman. He married Lovida Hardin, a Boston University graduate and daughter of a New Orleans physician, on February 10, 1945. The couple had three children: William T. III, Lovida H. Jr., and Hardin L. Coleman.
Coleman was born into a middle-class family that counted six generations of teachers and Episcopal ministers on one side of the family, and numerous social workers on the other. His father, William T. Coleman Sr., was the director of the Quaker-supported Germantown boys club for 40 years. Through his father and other family members, young William met some of the country's greatest black leaders, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall. From the time he was 10- or 12-years old he dreamed of becoming a lawyer, and would spend vacation days slipping into courtrooms trying to absorb as much as he could.
Coleman attended a racially segregated elementary school before entering Germantown High School, which was all white save for a contingent of seven token black students. An incident at the high school summed up the sort of racism that was a constant in that day. When he tried joining the all-white swimming team, he was suspended from school. Later, school officials reinstated him but cut the sport until he graduated.
Though Coleman earned excellent grades in high school, they were attained in an atmosphere of bigotry in which he was not encouraged by his teachers. Racism existed in higher education as well, but did not prevent him from persevering and excelling. He received his B.A. degree summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. To fulfill his childhood dream of becoming a lawyer, he entered the Harvard Law School in 1941.
World War II prevented Coleman from gaining his degree promptly, but gave him some valuable on-the-job training instead. In 1943 he dropped out of law school to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. Although he had completed but a single year of legal studies, he was assigned as defense counsel in 18 court-martial proceedings. Of those, he won 16 acquittals, with one of the two convictions later reversed.
After the war, Coleman returned to Harvard. He became the first black ever to serve on the board of editors of the Harvard Law Review. It was there that he first met a student named Elliot Richardson, with whom he would cross paths throughout his career. In 1946 he earned his LL.B. degree magna cum laude, graduating at the top of his class. As a Langdell Fellow, he stayed on at Harvard for an additional year of study.
Coleman was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar in 1947 and quickly garnered a position as law secretary to Judge Herbert F. Goodrich of U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. After several months in that job, he left it for an even more prestigious position. In 1948 he became a law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, becoming the first black to serve in that capacity for the nation's highest court.
One of the other clerks in Frankfurter's office was Richardson. They soon became good friends, regularly arriving early to read poetry together for an hour (they preferred W. H. Auden and Shakespeare) before getting their official duties underway. Their friendship lasted long beyond their stay there, with Richardson becoming godfather to Coleman's daughter.
After Coleman's clerkship ended in 1949, the young attorney was made an associate at the eminent New York law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton, and Garrison. While there, he was approached by Thurgood Marshall, the founder and head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (NAACP-LDF). Marshall told Coleman that he was working on cases that the NAACP hoped would lead to the end of segregation and asked Coleman to volunteer his help. Coleman was up to the challenge. "I would work at Paul, Weiss from nine to six and then go to L.D.E.F. `til 10 or 11 and then back to Paul, Weiss," he was quoted as saying later in a New York Times article. "On weekends, I would work with him (Marshall) again." They became good friends, with Coleman becoming the future Supreme Court justice's personal lawyer.
An opportunity for Coleman to return to Philadelphia arose three years later. District attorney and future Philadelphia mayor Richardson Dilworth offered him a spot on his staff. Sensing that he would just be the city's token black associate district attorney, Coleman turned him down. When Dilworth came back with an invitation to join his prominent Philadelphia law firm, Dilworth, Paxon, Kalish, Levy and Green, Coleman accepted. In so doing, he became the first black in the history of Philadelphia to join a white firm.
WORKS IN CIVIL RIGHTS
Coleman continued to work in civil rights on his own time. The five cases he worked for the NAACP during that period led to the historic Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended school segregation. Coleman, in fact, was coauthor of the brief presented to the court in the case. In the coming years he would defend freedom riders and other civil rights workers in cases throughout the South. He also served as co-counsel on the landmark case, McLaughlin v. Florida (1964), which established the constitutionality of interracial marriages.
At Dilworth, Paxon, he specialized in corporate and antitrust litigation, gaining recognition for his expertise in transportation law. Philadelphia and Cincinnati were among the cities he represented in mass transit and labor matters. He would go on to serve as special counsel and negotiator for both the Philadelphia and the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authorities. He became a partner at the firm in 1966; soon after, his election to senior partner was reflected in the name change to Dilworth, Paxon, Kalish, Levy and Coleman.
In 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Coleman, a longtime Republican, to serve on the President's Commission on Employment Policy, which dealt with increasing minority hiring in the government. It was the first of several presidential commissions on which Coleman would serve over the next two decades for Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon.
Coleman's knack for high finance and his understanding of labor issues were key to his being courted to join the boards of many corporations. He accepted the invitations of Penn Mutual Life Insurance, First Pennsylvania Banking and Trust, the Philadelphia Electric Company, and the Western Savings Fund Society. As he gained prominence, his board memberships took on a more national character, including Pan American World Airways, the Rand Corporation, and the American Stock Exchange.
In 1964 Coleman was named senior consultant and assistant counsel to the Warren Commission, which was charged with investigating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was as a member of that body that Coleman first met Congressman Representative Gerald R. Ford, the future president.
The next year, Coleman represented the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in litigation against Philadelphia's Girard College, a segregated institution. Similar attempts made in the mid-to-late 1950s to end the racially biased policies at the college had ended in defeat. This time, with Coleman in charge, the commonwealth won.
In 1971, four years after Thurgood Marshall had been elevated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Coleman was elected president of the NAACP-LDF. He also served on the boards of a number of educational, charitable, and service agencies, including the National Civil Service League, the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard University, and the Metropolitan Opera.
In the midst of the Watergate scandal in 1973, Elliot Richardson, now the U.S. attorney general, offered Coleman the opportunity to become Watergate special prosecutor. Coleman, who had been a member of President Nixon's National Commission on Productivity and the successful Phase II Price Commission (1971--72), turned his friend down. In fact, he reportedly advised the president to resign rather than face impeachment, and is on record as being in favor of allowing a president to destroy tapes and documents prior to leaving office.
BECOMES SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION
Early in 1975, Coleman received a call from President Ford concerning the vacant secretary of transportation post. Coleman had been offered full-time government appointments several times previously, but had always declined. He enjoyed working in the private sector and felt he could be more effective there. Besides, taking a position in the federal government also meant resigning from his law partnership and corporate directorships, taking a sizeable pay cut and selling his transportation stocks. Nevertheless, he decided to do the courteous thing, which was to meet with the president and hear him out.
To Coleman's astonishment, Ford's sincerity and the challenge of the job offered were enough to sway him to accept. He became the second black ever to hold a cabinet-level position (the first was Robert C. Waver as secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 1966--68 under Lyndon B. Johnson).
As secretary of transportation, he took over the fourth- largest department in the government, with a budget exceeded only by those of the Departments of Defense and Health, Education and Welfare. Established just nine years earlier, the department was facing major problems in several of the areas over which it had jurisdiction. The nation's railroads, mass transit and federal highway systems, and international airlines all had crises that needed to be addressed.
In an interview with the magazine Black Enterprise for June of 1975, Coleman said that his first concern was that: I would like to leave Washington with the same reputation for integrity that I had when I came here. Secondly, I hope I can leave Washington with the reputation of having helped to guide and put together a very important department, of having gathered around me a lot of very good people who made tremendous gains in solving the problems in the areas you mentioned.
Coleman made it his first priority to develop a comprehensive national transportation policy, something the American government had never really attempted before. Coleman was instrumental in creating the 53-page study A Statement of National Transportation Policy, which he sent to Congress in September of 1975. Rather than a list of possible solutions, the document contained general principles that he felt should guide the government's decision-making process.
Coleman's ability to influence the problems facing transportation in this county, however, proved modest during his short, two-year tenure. As a fiscally responsible member of a Republican administration, Coleman tried to make the various transportation sectors less reliant on tax-supported assistance. Instead, he favored imposing user fees on those who use the majority of an industry's services. However, the Democratic Congress kept appropriations high and, in some cases, even doubled the recommendations sent down from the White House. Though no one called his integrity into question, his efforts went unappreciated, although they may have helped set the stage for the Reagan Revolution four years later.
Upon his resignation when President Carter took office, Coleman opted for a return to the private sector. He stayed in the capital to become head of a 32-lawyer Washington office of O'Melveny & Myers, a large Los Angeles-based firm. By the early 1980s, he was earning $500,000 or more a year for representing major companies including Ford, IBM, and the Insurance Company of North America. He also returned to corporate boardrooms, serving on nine boards of directors. He remained active in civil rights, arguing cases, writing an occasional editorial, and continuing his affiliation with the NAACP.
On September 29, 1995, Coleman received the highest honor given to civilians, the Presidential Medal of Freedom , awarded to individual Americans for distinguished civilian service. President Clinton said, "I can honestly say, if you are looking for an example of constancy, consistency, disciplined devotion to the things that make this country a great place, you have no further to look than William Coleman, Jr." Clinton first met Coleman at Yale Law School, where he roomed for a year with Coleman's son, William T. Coleman III.
When Coleman's long-time friend and colleague Thurgood Marshall died in 1993, Coleman was one of four speakers at the funeral. Four years later, Coleman was honored with the Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Achievement Award of the NAACP-LDF. In addition to serving as the fund's president in the early 1970s, he later became chairman and long served in that capacity.
Coleman is a short, stocky man with a jowly face and high forehead. He wears rather large spectacles and dresses impeccably. He has been, or continues as, a member of numerous organizations and clubs, including the American College of Trial Lawyers, the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers, the Philadelphia Bar Association, and the Arbitration Association.
Coleman is important as a public servant and civil rights and corporate lawyer. His work to end school segregation with the landmark decision in 1954 enshrined him in the annals of U.S. history.
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Medal History
