William Coleman Jr., 96; civil rights lawyer, U.S. transportation secretary

William Coleman Jr., who helped draft the landmark 1954 legal case in which the Supreme Court ruled that segregation in public schools was illegal and who later became the country's second black Cabinet officer after President Gerald R. Ford named him transportation secretary, died March 31 at his home in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 96.

The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, said a daughter, Lovida Hardin Coleman Jr.

Throughout his long career, Coleman was often at the forefront of major public events, legal battles and significant social advances. In 1948, he became the first African-American to serve as a law clerk to a Supreme Court justice, and within two years he was working alongside Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund on major desegregation cases.

In the 1960s, Coleman was a staff lawyer for the Warren Commission, investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He defended young civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders and successfully argued a Supreme Court case that helped eliminate prohibitions against interracial marriage.

A progressive Republican, Coleman was an adviser to every president, Republican and Democrat, from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush.

"He opened many, many doors and, by example, showed how absurd discrimination really is," Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2010. "It is important that people who don't know him understand what he has done."

Coleman began working with Marshall on the Brown case in 1950, coordinating research efforts in 37 states. Ultimately, five cases — from Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia — collectively came to be known as Brown v. Board of Education. Coleman helped write the legal briefs, which formed the basis of Marshall's arguments before the Supreme Court in December 1952 and again one year later.

The high court unanimously ruled in May 1954 that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place."

Ten years later, in the case of McLaughlin v. Florida, Coleman argued against a Florida law that barred "any negro man and white woman, or any white man and negro woman" from living together. The Supreme Court overturned the law and, three years later, declared all prohibitions against interracial marriage unconstitutional.