Coffin, William Sloane, Jr (1924- )

US clergyman and social activist. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he was arrested several times during the civil-rights struggles of the 1960s. He was sued by the US government for advising draft resistance during the Vietnam War in 1968; the charges were dropped in 1970. At the Riverside Church in New York City 1977-87, he offered sanctuary to Central American refugees and the homeless.

He was born in New York City. He interrupted his studies at Yale to serve the US Army as a liaison officer with the French and Russians 1943-47, then took his BA from Yale in 1949. He attended the Union Theological Seminary in New York 1949-50, then served abroad with the Central Intelligence Agency as a specialist on Russian affairs 1950-53. He subsequently became the youngest chaplain in the history of Yale 1958-75. He became director of the SANE/FREEZE Campaign for Global Security in 1988. He is 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’. (Yale graduate Garry Trudeau would lightly satirize him in his ‘Doonesbury’ comic strip as the hip minister, ‘Rev. Scot Sloan’.)