A former associate justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court and its first Black member, James H. Coleman Jr., who spent his career breaking barriers in the state, died Friday at 91.

Coleman’s passing was announced by Porzio, Bromberg & Newman, where he served as of counsel since joining the firm in 2004 following his retirement from the court. He was born in 1933, the son of a sharecropper in segregated Lawrenceville, Georgia, in the midst of the Great Depression. Coleman graduated salutatorian from James S. Russell High School and went on to earn his bachelor’s degree from Virginia State University in 1956 and his law degree from Howard University School of Law in 1959.