biography
| name: |
Coffin, William Sloane, Jr
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1924– )
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| biography:
| Protestant clergyman and social activist, born in New York City, New York, USA. He interrupted his studies at Yale to serve in the US Army as a liaison officer with the French and Russians (1943–7), then took his BA from Yale (1949). He attended the Union Theological Seminary (New York City) (1949–50), then served abroad with the Central Intelligence Agency as a specialist on Russian affairs (1950–3). Ordained as a Presbyterian minister (1956), he served as a chaplain at Phillips Andover Academy and Williams College before becoming the youngest chaplain in the history of Yale (1958–75). During his tenure there, he was one of 11 Freedom Riders to Montgomery, AL (1961), and was arrested on several occasions during the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. He was one of five individuals (Dr Benjamin Spock was another) who were sued by the US Department of Justice for conspiring to counsel draft resistance during the war in Vietnam (1968); the charges were dropped in 1970. (Yale graduate Garry Trudeau would lightly satirize him in his ‘Doonesbury’ comic strip as the hip minister, ‘Rev Scot Sloan’). He left Yale and became the senior minister at the Riverside Church in New York City (1977–87), where his social activism, offering sanctuary to Central American refugees and providing shelter to homeless people, again caused controversy. He resigned from the Riverside pastorate to become director of the SANE/FREEZE Campaign for Global Security (1988). The author of such works as Civil Disobedience: Aid or Hindrance to Justice? (with Morris L Leibman, 1972), he described himself as a man having ‘a lover's quarrel with the United States’. |
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