Dr. William Coffin will be missed

Editors, Asheville Global Report, Regret that the AGR "missed the boat" in their lack of coverage of the passing of a well known fiery and controversial social activist, the Rev. Dr. William Sloane Coffin Jr., former Presbyterian minister and Yale University chaplain, who died at age 81 on Apr. 12 at his home in Strafford, VT. Dr. Coffin had been reported as suffering from congestive heart failure and sometime earlier had a stroke which left him with somewhat slurred speech. In the 1960s he rose to prominence as a professor who used his position at Yale to demonstrate against the Vietnam War and counsel young men on avoiding service with public draft card burning in front of the pacifist sanctuary of the Arlington Street Church, located in the Back Bay of Boston. This Unitarian interdenominational edifice sheltered conscientious objectors in those turbulent years of the sixties. In this effort of opposing the draft and what Coffin termed as an unjust war which he felt was "at the heart of the Gospel" he led campaigns against involvement in such conflicts together with the late physician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, an ally in the opposition to the Vietnam War. The press called Rev. Coffin a natural leader for the protesting students of the 1960s. He also took his first "Freedom Ride" to Montgomery, AL, in 1961 to challenge the segregation of southern buses. Truly Dr. Coffin, former senior minister at the famed interdenominational Riverside Church in NYC was a social critic and a man of conscience who practiced what he preached. He will be sorely missed by friends who also "marched to the beat of a different drummer." Fred R. Chaffee Hendersonville, NC