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’.)