William T. Coleman Jr.

William Thaddeus Coleman Jr. was born on the seventh of July 1920 at Germantown, Pennsylvania, the second child of William Thaddeus Coleman Sr. — the principal of the Cheltenham Township Black YMCA and a graduate of Williams College — and Laura Beatrice Coleman, a Bryn Mawr-trained social worker. His father had played football at Williams under Walter Camp before being barred from the field of any further intercollegiate game on the colour line. The Coleman household was one of the most cultivated of Philadelphia Black professional families. He completed the Germantown High School and the bachelor's at the University of Pennsylvania in 1941.

He served as an officer in the United States Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1946 — including service in the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field defence-counsel office, where as a captain he prosecuted the airmen's protest of the segregation at the Freeman Field officers' club in April 1945 that produced the Air Force desegregation order. He completed the LL.B. at Harvard Law School in 1946 as the editor of the Harvard Law Review and the bar examination of Pennsylvania in October 1946 with the highest score in the cohort.

He served the 1947 term as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter — the first African American law clerk at the Supreme Court of the United States. Frankfurter had wanted to hire him a year earlier; the recommendation was deferred at Frankfurter's insistence one year on grounds that the country was not ready. Coleman thereafter joined the private firm of Paul Weiss in New York and from 1952 the Philadelphia firm of Dilworth Paxson.

He served the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1948 as co-counsel on the major civil-rights cases of the period — co-author of the brief in Brown v. Board of Education, lead counsel for the NAACP in McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents of 1950, and co-counsel of the 1956 Pennsylvania Public Accommodations case Pennsylvania v. Brown. He served on the executive committee of the LDF from 1972 to his death.

President Gerald Ford appointed him in March 1975 Secretary of Transportation — the second African American Cabinet member after Robert Weaver under Lyndon Johnson. He served until January 1977 and returned to private practice at the Washington firm O'Melveny and Myers.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton in 1995. He died at Alexandria, Virginia, on the thirty-first of March 2017, at ninety-six.

He is honored here as Secretary of Transportation and senior Brown counsel.