Remembering Outspoken Dejustice Coleman, Milwaukee’s Black Secret Service Agent

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Photo via University of Illinois archives

Dejustice Coleman as a University of Illinois halfback circa 1957

Dejustice Coleman as a University of Illinois halfback circa 1957

In light of the hoopla over incredible flubs by the U.S. Secret Service in July 13’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump, many Milwaukeeans may recall the late Dejustice Coleman. A Black, long-time Secret Service agent, who was fired in 1984 after 23 years, Coleman opened up to me in 1986.

When we talked at length during my Milwaukee Journal interview, the 48-year-old let it all hang out. He told me he was fired in in 1984 and sued the agency (and Milwaukee’s Richard E. Artisan, the agent in charge) for $3 million in federal court.

Coleman said that in 1968, he refused the agency’s order to infiltrate the civil-rights group led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In 1978, he said, he filed a discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the Secret Service. Since then, he was unable to find employment of any kind.

Coleman’s case is a classic close encounter of the frustrating kind. He lost his career, home, security and children’s education. He retained only belief in himself and disappointment in fellow agents, including Artisan, his Secret Service boss. Artisan, of course, later became Milwaukee County sheriff.

“The Secret Service was only able to suspend my husband with the help, concurrence of Dick Artisan, the SAIC in question,” said his wife, Dorothy, 49, in a July 1983 letter to wives of other Black agents. “It is very sad when our Back men are manipulated by the Secret Service so as to pit them against each other…” she wrote.

Guarding Ronald Reagan

During his 23-year career, Coleman was assigned to guard President Ronald Reagan. Said he: “Some of my darkest days was on his watch. He seemed detached, oblivious about the plight of minority SAs on the White House detail protecting him and his family. “I guarded Reagan eight or nine times in Milwaukee and elsewhere and was supervisor of a group of SAs. I was positioned as a ‘post-stander’ and was understudy to a young, less-experienced non-Black SA,” he said. “As a result, I filed a written complaint in protest, thereby fueling perceptions of, and labeling me, as a Black militant by white, racially intolerant managers of USSS.”

Coleman, a resident of Brown Deer when we spoke, told me the world looked rosy when he joined the Secret Service in 1968 after three years as a police officer. Things began to sour two years later when on “moral ground” and his “longstanding relationship with the Rev. Jesse Jackson,” he said “no” to becoming a mole in the civil-rights movement.

The next 10 years, he said, saw him supervised by less-experienced white agents. In 1974 and 1977, he co-authored two memos to the Agency on what he felt were discriminatory practices in recruitment, job assignments, promotions and harassment of Black agents.

In 1978, Coleman was removed as resident agent in Fresno, California. This led to his 1978 EEO complaint, which was dismissed in 1981 when a Black agent who co-authored the earlier memos, testified against him.

Dismissed from the Service

The incident leading to his dismissal—what he called a minor one-car accident in Milwaukee in December 1982—had its roots in Africa the previous month, he said, when he was assigned to guard Vice President George Bush. According to Coleman, medical shots for the trip later reacted with a small amount of liquor he consumed after work, causing him to black-out at the wheel on the way home. 

The real reason he was fired, Coleman told me, was his outspokenness on conditions for Black special agents, of which there were about 75 out of 1,800 during his tenure. And what was Artisan’s role? “As my husband’s immediate supervisor, he knew what was going on, yet he sat silently,” said Dorothy Coleman.

And what did Artisan say about Coleman? “Many of the things he alleges simply are not true,” Artisan told me. “A lot of what he says is designed to embarrass me. It’s been hashed and rehashed many times since, and nothing has changed.”

Part of the rehashing included Coleman’s lawsuit. “On advice of counsel, I moved to have it dismissed myself,” Coleman said. This would permit him to file again later. Subsequent appeals and visits to Washington were unproductive. Coleman received no severance pay and his retirement and annual leave money disappeared, along with medical benefits, which especially affected his teenage daughter, a diabetic. 

He had to take two sons out of college, Dorothy had to go to work, Dejustice looked for work, and neither was very happy. And before his death in 2021, he was a man forgotten, who could not forget.

All of that was then—and this is now. And the once respected, vaunted U.S. Secret Service is under the gun for its failure on July 13, 2024, which came close to causing the death of a presidential candidate.

If the late Dejustice Coleman were still around, I wonder what he would think.