Coleman: A Choice Cabinet Choice

In a move that will add luster as well as diversity to his Cabinet, President Ford this week will name William Thaddeus Coleman Jr., 54, Secretary of Transportation. A senior partner in a prestigious Philadelphia law firm and former president of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Coleman has filled appointive posts under four Presidents. Married and the father of three children, he will be the second black to hold Cabinet rank; Robert Weaver, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 1966 to 1968, was the first.

A magna cum laude graduate from Harvard Law School in 1946, Coleman was selected by Justice Felix Frankfurter to be the first black law clerk in the history of the Supreme Court. He and another young clerk, Elliot Richardson, used to spend one uninterrupted hour each morning reading poetry together.

Coleman helped draft the brief that led to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation. He defended Freedom Riders and sit-in demonstrators in the 1960s and represented the N.A.A.C.P. in a case that found unconstitutional a Florida law prohibiting cohabitation between the races. At the request of former Pennsylvania Governor William Scranton, he led the legal fight to desegregate Girard College in 1965. Coleman served on the Eisenhower National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, President Kennedy's Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the Warren Commission and the federal Price Commission in 1971 and was a U.S. delegate to the 24th United Nations General Assembly.

A Republican, he urged Richard Nixon to resign rather than put the country through a lengthy and divisive impeachment process. But he also argued that the President should be permitted to destroy tapes and documents before leaving office.

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