Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 21, 1994 TAG: 9411210097
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LAWRENCEVILLE LENGTH: Medium
``He was the type of kid, you knew he was going to do something,'' said Tenus F. Thompson, the high school football coach for the kid who next month will become the first black person to sit on the New Jersey Supreme Court.
``I don't know if you're born with that type of innate ability or you develop it. But this guy was always cut from a different cloth. Everything with Coleman was business.''
Coleman was a son of Virginia sharecroppers who dressed for success even as a teen-ager in rural Brunswick County.
``He used to wear a bow tie all the time,'' said George R. ``Billy'' Smith, a retired teacher who was a classmate and football teammate of Coleman's at James Solomon Russell High School. ``He was always very well-dressed.''
His coach ribbed Coleman about it. ``I called him `professor.'''
``I must have been a copycat,'' Coleman said of his bow ties during a telephone interview last week from his chambers in Springfield, N.J. ``My civics teacher wore them, and I admired him.''
In October, Coleman, 61, became New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman's first nominee to the state Supreme Court. He won unanimous confirmation and will take office Dec. 16.
Coleman is a 1956 graduate of Virginia State University in Petersburg. He earned his law degree in 1959 from Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. A Howard classmate was Douglas Wilder, who in 1989 would be elected governor of Virginia and become the nation's first elected black governor.
While Wilder returned to Virginia and began his political career, Coleman went to New Jersey to practice law.
Coleman became a judge in Union County in 1973, then a Superior Court judge in 1981. Since 1987, he has been presiding appellate judge.
But Coleman began his education in the segregated schools of Southside Virginia. He graduated from Russell High in 1952, two years after it opened. It was the first local high school for blacks.
``The white kids had a public high school,'' Coleman said. ``The blacks had no public high school, even under separate-but-equal.''
Prior to 1950, the county had an arrangement to send black students to nearby St. Paul's, an all-black college. Because of limited space, some youngsters never got the high school education they were due. But Coleman was in no danger of being left out, said those who knew him.
``I got the impression that he wanted to make something of himself,'' said Smith. Coleman, he recalled, always came to class prepared. ``Even then, he stood out in a crowd.''
``Coleman just had that leadership ability,'' Thompson said. ``He was a person you could leave in charge. He was someone the other students looked up to.''
The school, now a junior high, sits along Virginia 46 just north of Lawrenceville, a few miles from where Coleman's brother Nathaniel still lives.
In the time Coleman came of age, the region of tobacco farms was home to Albertis S. Harrison Jr., a rising political star who would become Virginia's governor and a state Supreme Court justice.
But there was no such promise for black children. When school integration became an issue, Virginia responded with a policy of Massive Resistance. That, Coleman says, explains why he never came home after college.
``For the same reason that the immigrants came to this country, in search of better opportunities. I didn't think those opportunities existed for me at the time in Virginia.''
Johnnye Thompson, Tenus Thompson's sister-in-law, taught the future judge algebra.
``Even though he always seemed to be focused, he would not give you the impression of being, let us say, out of sync with other students,'' Mrs. Thompson said. ``He was not that way.''
Coleman was popular. He was elected junior class president. And he graduated second in his senior class.
``The thing that I recall about him is that he always exemplified leadership qualities,'' Mrs. Thompson said. ``He always moved with dispatch, as if he really knew where he was going.''
by CNB