James P. Coleman

James Plemon "J.P." Coleman (January 9, 1914 – September 28, 1991) was a politician from the state of Mississippi.

He was born in Ackerman, Mississippi. He obtained a law degree from The George Washington University Law School in 1939. As a young man, he served upon the staff of Mississippi Congressman Aaron L. Ford. In Washington, D.C., he made a name for himself by challenging and defeating another young southern congressional staffer and future president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, for Speaker of the Little Congress, a body that Johnson had dominated before Coleman's challenge. Coleman and Johnson became lifelong friends.

Returning to Mississippi, Coleman was elected District Attorney in 1940, and served until 1946, when he became judge on the state circuit court. After a stint as a justice on the Mississippi Supreme Court, Coleman was the Mississippi Attorney General from 1950 to 1956. Coleman became the Governor of Mississippi in 1956 as a moderate candidate in a campaign where, to appease the emotions of the day, he promised to uphold segregation. As governor, he befriended Democratic presidential nominee, Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but set up the State Sovereignty Commission.

In 1959, Coleman appointed the author Thomas Hal Phillips of Corinth to a vacancy on the Mississippi Public Service Commission created by the resignation of Rubel Phillips, Hal Phillips' younger brother. After his term ended in 1960, Coleman won a seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives and served until 1964. He thus became the only Mississippi politician in history to serve in an elected capacity in all three branches of the state's government.

In his subsequent campaign for governor in 1963, Coleman lost the Democratic nomination to Paul B. Johnson, Jr., a son of a former governor. Segregationist Johnson painted Coleman as a racial moderate and friend of the Kennedy administration. Paul Johnson's campaign staff charged that during the 1960 presidential campaign Coleman had allowed U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts to sleep in the Governor's Mansion in the bed formerly used by the late Governor and U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo.^[1] Johnson went on to defeat the Democrat-turned-Republican Rubel Phillips in the 1963 general election, then a new political opportunity for Mississippi voters.

President Kennedy offered Coleman various posts, including United States Secretary of the Army and United States Ambassador to Australia, but Coleman declined. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, President Lyndon Baines Johnson appointed Coleman to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, where he served from 1965 to 1981. He assumed senior status on May 31, 1981. Coleman finished his career in Ackerman, where he practiced law and farmed until he suffered a severe stroke on December 11, 1990.

J. P. Coleman State Park, a state park in Mississippi, is named after him.

References

External links

• Oral History Interview with James P. Coleman at Oral Histories of the American South
• James P. Coleman at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges, a public domain publication of the Federal Judicial Center.

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