William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.: Breaking the Color Barrier at the U.S. Supreme Court

Abstract

William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.: Breaking the Color Barrier at the U.S. Supreme Court TODD C. PEPPERS Introduction On April 15, 2007, baseball fans celebrated the sixtieth anniversary ofJackie Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers—an event that broke the color barrier and integrated major league baseball. In stadiums across America, professional baseball teams honored the memory and ac­ complishments ofRobinson, as managers and players donned Robinson’s retiredjersey number, Hall of Famers threw out ceremonial first pitches, and tributes boomed from video displays. The tributes to Robinson, however, like his legacy, went far beyond the ballparks, as newspaper and television journalists debated Robinson’s role as a civil-rights pioneer while lamenting the dwindling number ofminorities playing baseball and elementary school children read stories of Robinson’s stirring feats. On September 1, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court perhaps should celebrate a similar an­ niversary: the sixtiethanniversary ofthe arrival of the first black law clerk at the Court. His name is William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr.,1 and on September 1, 1948, Coleman began clerk­ ing in the Chambers of Associate Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Coleman used his Supreme Court clerkship as a stepping stone to a remarkable legal and political career, highlights of which include working as the first black lawyer in both major Philadelphia and New York law firms, volunteering his time and expertise for the desegregation cases col­ lectively referred to as Brown v. Board ofEd­ ucation, being president and then chairman of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educa­ tional Fund ofthe National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), serving as the Secretary of Transportation in the Ford administration, and receiving the Presidential Medal ofFreedom from President Clinton. 354 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY The purpose of this essay is twofold: It will endeavor to succinctly summarize the im­ portant events of Coleman’s life and profes­ sional career, while making the argument that these achievements were as groundbreaking in the legal community as Robinson’s were to baseball. Admittedly, looking to our na­ tional pastime is hardly an original literary ma­ neuver; The myriad similarities and links be­ tween baseball and the law have offered rich material for many legal writers.2 Moreover, this article does not wish to diminish Cole­ man’s accomplishments by comparing them to a mere “game.” By drawing upon the sixtieth anniversary of Robinson’s debut, my hope is to give Coleman his due and place his laud­ able achievements in the proper perspective. Not only did the two men do much to dispel the pernicious stereotype that they belonged to a race that was doomed to second-class cit­ izenship, but their efforts to integrate their re­ spective professions and to use their talents to effect change reverberatedthroughout society. The Early Life of William T. Coleman, Jr. William Thaddeus Coleman, Jr. was born on July 7, 1920, in Germantown, Pennsylvania to parents William Thaddeus Coleman, Sr. and Laura Beatrice Coleman. One of three chil­ dren, Coleman grewup in a middle-class home where education and hard work were encour­ aged. Social activism and public service were practices engrained into Coleman’s family. His father was a graduate of the Hampton Insti­ tute who balanced his work as the executive director of the Wissahickon Boys Club—an organization originally founded to provided educational and recreational opportunities for minorities and poor whites—with his duties as a field secretary for the Boys Club ofAmerica and as a director of a local summer camp. William Coleman, Sr. was given the mid­ dle name “Thaddeus” in honor of Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania lawyer and congress­ man who tirelessly worked for the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendmend to the United States Constitution. William Coleman, Jr.’s maternal great-great-grandfather was an Epis­ copal minister who operated the underground railroad in St. Louis, Missouri. Coleman’s mother was a former German teacher who also greatly influenced her son. “My mother always said what would redeem her living in a world where blacks and women were second place [was] that when she got to heaven, God would be a black woman.”3 One pattern of Coleman...