CREDIT: Associated Press
IN 1961, as Rev. William Sloane Coffin disembarked from a Greyhound bus in Montgomery, Alabama, he stepped into a world he had never known. The worldly chaplain of Yale University was confronted by a crowd of angry white people hurling rocks and bricks at him and his small, racially integrated group of civil rights sympathizers. As the sweat dampened their suits, Coffin looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable.
Coffin and his comrades had not only angered southern whites. They had also gone up against John F. Kennedy’s administration. Their decision to join the Freedom Rides came just as President Kennedy was preparing to go to Europe for delicate talks with the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev. The last thing Kennedy wanted was a spotlight on protests back home. As historian Taylor Branch noted in Parting the Waters, “To Kennedy, the Coffin group represented a distressing change in the composition of the protesters. No longer confined to Quakers, kooks, students, pacifists or even Negro Gandhians, the ranks of the Freedom Riders suddenly included prominent Ivy League professors.” A furious Attorney General Robert Kennedy even ordered the National Guard and federal marshals to pull back from their position of protecting the Freedom Riders. The next morning, as Coffin and the others prepared to board a bus for Jackson, Mississippi, they were arrested in the bus depot. Coffin spent his first night in jail.
The action was vintage Coffin: bold, principled, and guaranteed to put him in the headlines. The New York Times carried a front-page photo and Life magazine carried a piece, “Why Yale Chaplain Rode: Christians Can’t Be Outside.”
No one would have predicted that a man of Coffin’s patrician background would end up being the strongest progressive voice of white Christianity during one of the nation’s most turbulent times. He seemed destined instead for a life of elected office, diplomacy, or industry.
The Coffins traced their lineage to the Pilgrims. His father was a wealthy and prominent businessman and president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s board of trustees. Bill and his brother and sister lived with their parents in a Manhattan penthouse until their world turned upside down in 1933. Their father slipped on the steps of the Met and died later that day of a heart attack.
Suddenly with greatly reduced means, Bill’s mother, Catherine, moved her children to Carmel-by-the-Sea in California and later to Paris so Bill could study piano, his passion. Thanks to financial support from his uncle, Rev. Henry Coffin, he was able to continue his education at prestigious boarding schools, then at Yale, before being drafted during World War II.
During basic training, Coffin was first exposed to segregation and overt racism. But in general the Army suited him. He reveled in the chance to be physically tough, exhibit leadership, and face danger. He excelled in languages, including Russian, and in 1946 was part of an operation to forcibly repatriate prisoners of war to Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, where they were sure to be either killed or sent to labor camps. “It was one of the worst things of my life,” he told the Boston Globe in 2004. And it happened, he said, “because I was a good soldier.” He continued, “Subsequently, it has been very easy for me to disobey a law or an order concerning life and death. You can’t say ‘I’m following orders.’ That’s a reason, but no excuse.”
After the war, Coffin returned to Yale—where generations of Coffin males had gone before—and graduated with a degree in government. Then he enrolled at Union Theological Seminary (UTS), where students were urged to tackle challenging social problems and to resist serving wealthy, complacent congregations. He did an internship at a Harlem church, his first real exposure to the poor.
After working for the CIA during the Korean War, Coffin transferred from UTS to Yale Divinity School. Upon his graduation in 1956, he took a job as chaplain at Phillips Academy, then Williams College, and then, in 1958, at Yale. He spent the next eighteen years there, inspiring a generation of students with his activist vision of Christianity. As Warren Goldstein writes in William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: A Holy Impatience, “God, he argued, had been reduced to a quaint anachronism and an extracurricular activity. Coffin set out to change the way students thought about God and their lives.”
When Coffin saw images of African Americans being beaten in Alabama, he was ready to take a stand. On the spur of the moment, he contacted his friend John Maguire from Wesleyan University, and the two managed to convince a small group to travel with them to the South.
After being jailed and making national news, Coffin returned to a storm of controversy at Yale; some alumni threatened to withhold donations unless he was fired. Much of the faculty, though, had contributed bail money to Coffin, and Yale’s president Whitney Griswold strongly backed him. Coffin would be jailed two more times over the next few years, protesting segregation in Baltimore, Maryland, and in St. Augustine, Florida.
“Every minister is given two roles, the priestly and the prophetic,” Coffin said, explaining his activism. “The prophetic role is the disturber of the peace, to bring the minister himself, the congregation and entire moral order some judgment.”
As the Vietnam War heated up, Coffin initially hesitated to join the peace movement. His years in the army and the CIA predisposed him to support US foreign and military policy. He even preached a sermon called “Christians Could Go Either Way on the Vietnam War.”
In 1965 a chance encounter with a student changed his mind. Paul Jordan confronted Coffin, bringing him a fat file of articles and speeches. Coffin stayed up through the night absorbing the material, documenting “a history of corruption, of misperceptions and missed opportunities the likes of which I had never imagined,” as he later wrote. Coffin became a convert.
In August 1965 he joined his first speak-out about the war, and later that year he became involved with Clergy Concerned About Vietnam along with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, whose writings and activism had a significant influence on Coffin. Using his many connections, deep understanding of liberal Christian thought, and vast powers of oratory, Coffin galvanized others to action. Along with Norman Thomas, he became cochairman of SANE, a major peace group, and, with other clergy leaders, he met with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and other officials in Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration.
Impatient with the continued escalation of the war, Coffin turned to civil disobedience. On October 2, 1967, Coffin led a press conference at the New York Hilton releasing “A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority,” an antidraft manifesto signed by 320 prominent people, including MIT professor Noam Chomsky, poet Robert Lowell, and pediatrician Benjamin Spock. He also announced that Battell Chapel at Yale would be a sanctuary for students resisting the draft. Soon after, he was part of a rally of 5,000 people on Boston Common, where young men turned in their draft cards in protest. In Washington, DC, days later, Coffin and ten others tried to deliver a briefcase full of draft cards to the Justice Department, but to their frustration, Assistant Deputy Attorney General John McDonough refused to accept them.
In 1968, Coffin, Spock, and three others were indicted for conspiracy to violate the draft law. Four of the five were convicted in a well-publicized trial. The verdicts were overturned on appeal. Coffin’s close connection with students and his nationwide reputation—he even inspired a Doonesbury cartoon character, Rev. Scot Sloan, drawn by Yale graduate Garry Trudeau—helped shield him from ongoing demands for his dismissal from Yale.
Coffin continued his peace efforts with a trip to Hanoi in 1972, where he and other clergy and peace activists accompanied three US prisoners of war on their return home.
In 1976 he stepped down from Yale, and in 1978 he became senior minister of the influential Riverside Church in New York, a bastion of liberal Christianity. At Riverside, he also oversaw a deep and divisive debate over the issue of homosexuality. Initially giving cautious lip service to tolerance, he later became strongly supportive of full equality for gay people, leading the church to vote to become “Open and Affirming”—open to gay people and affirming of them as Christians.
He left Riverside in 1987 to become the president of SANE/Freeze, the largest disarmament organization in the country. After retirement, he continued working for peace, opposing the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite his lifelong activism, Coffin did not consider himself a pacifist. During the genocide in Bosnia, he argued that there are times when international intervention with force is justified.
In the fall of 2003, invited back to preach at Riverside Church, Coffin told the congregants that there was “a huge difference between patriotism and nationalism.”
“Patriotism at the expense of another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race,” he declared. A descendant of the Pilgrims, Coffin revealed his fervent patriotism by challenging his country to live up to its democratic values.