John Malveaux of
writes:
Remarkable contributions of William T. Coleman Jr.
William
T. Coleman Jr., who championed the cause of civil rights in milestone
cases before the Supreme Court and who rose above racial barriers
himself as an influential lawyer and as a cabinet secretary, died Friday
at his home in Alexandria, Va. He was 96.
His
death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for the international law firm
O’Melveny & Myers, where Mr. Coleman was a senior partner in its
Washington office. He lived at a care facility with his wife of more
than 70 years, Lovida Coleman.
A
lifelong Republican, Mr. 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.
Mr.
Coleman found success on the heels of a brilliant academic career, but
he did so in the face of bigotry — what he called “the more subtle brand
of Yankee racism” — from which his middle-class upbringing in
Philadelphia did not shield him. In one episode, his high school
disbanded its all-white swimming team rather than let him join it.
Those experiences would inform his efforts in three major civil rights cases before the United States Supreme Court.
In
one, Mr. 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.
Mr.
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. Mr. Coleman, a corporate lawyer
with expertise in transportation issues, was on the Pan Am board of
directors at the time.
A
portly man partial to impeccably tailored suits, he and Ford had become
friends in 1964, when Mr. 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.
As the second African-American to hold a cabinet post, Mr. Coleman followed Robert C. Weaver, who was housing secretary in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administrat Mr.
Coleman 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.
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