Sharecropper's son who rose from poverty to become first Black New Jersey justice dies at 91
Former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice James H. Coleman Jr. died at age 91 on Aug. 2, rising from his childhood in a home without electricity and running water to become the first Black justice appointed to the state supreme court. (Photo courtesy of Porzio, Bromberg & Newman)
Updated: Former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice James H. Coleman Jr. died at age 91 on Aug. 2, rising from his childhood in a home without electricity and running water to become the first Black justice appointed to the state supreme court.
Coleman was nominated to the New Jersey Supreme Court by then-Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in 1994. He retired from the court in 2003 and became of counsel to Porzio, Bromberg & Newman, the law firm said in a statement on Coleman’s death.
Coleman told an interviewer in 2017 that his “historical journey to the New Jersey Supreme Court started well below the first round on a ladder.”
He was born in Lawrenceville, Virginia, during the Great Depression to a father who could neither read nor write and a mother who read at about the first grade level. His father had been a sharecropper until about the time of Coleman’s birth.
Coleman began his education in a one-room schoolhouse, going on to graduate cum laude from Virginia State University in 1956 and from the Howard University School of Law in 1959.
As a youth, Coleman would study before school while plowing fields with a mule. He used a book holder that he created and attached to the plow. In high school, he always wore a bow tie and a white shirt that he would hand-wash and iron with a cast iron heated on the cooking stove.
Coleman said he grew up wanting to become part of the American dream.
“I wanted part of that dream, but in a different way—not to make money, but to try to be of service to mankind—and that was the motivation that kept me moving forward,” he said in the 2017 interview.
Coleman’s judicial career began in 1973 as a Union County judge, according to a New Jersey courts biography. He went on to become a superior court judge and an appellate division judge.
Before joining the bench, Coleman worked in private practice and as a lawyer for the New Jersey Department of Labor. He was appointed as a judge of the New Jersey workers’ compensation court in 1964.
While on the New Jersey Supreme Court, Coleman wrote a decision finding that in cases involving cross-racial eyewitness identification, a special jury charge on the unreliability of such identification is required. While an appeals court judge, he wrote an opinion striking down the use of peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors because of race.
Coleman is the author of A Plowboy’s Judicial Coronation and the Intersection of Law and Religion: An Autobiography.
New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner said in a statement Coleman’s life story “will continue to serve as an inspiration for generations to come. He was without question a pioneer in New Jersey’s court system: the first African American to serve as a workers’ compensation judge, the first to serve as an appellate judge, and the first African American to serve on the state supreme court.”
During his judicial career, Coleman wrote more than 2,000 opinions, Rabner said.
“As Justice Coleman eloquently described in an essay after his retirement,” Rabner said, “he ‘looked for the opportunity in every difficulty, rather than the difficulty in every opportunity.’ In doing so, he marked a path that has helped create a fairer system of justice.”
A wake is scheduled for Aug. 23 at Martin’s Funeral Home in Montclair, New Jersey. The entombment is scheduled for Aug. 24 at Saint Stephen’s Cemetery & the Chapel at Short Hills in Millburn, New Jersey. Details are available here.
Updated Aug. 5 at 12:10 p.m. to add details of the funeral arrangements. Updated Aug. 6 at 7:45 a.m. to include New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner’s statement.
