Reply #1: RIP. [View All]

[beam me up scottie]

I wish I had met Mr. Coffin, I think I would have liked him.

The WP has a great article about him:

William Sloane Coffin Jr.; Chaplain Was Lifelong 'Disturber of the Peace'

By Matt Schudel and Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 13, 2006; Page B06

William Sloane Coffin Jr., 81, a Presbyterian clergyman and former Yale University chaplain whose early activism against the Vietnam War brought him international notoriety during a lifelong career of civil disobedience, died April 12 at his home in Strafford, Vt. He had congestive heart failure.

From the moment in 1958 when Mr. Coffin roared onto Yale's campus atop his motorcycle, he signaled that his presence would mean a distinctly radical approach to the social, political and moral upheaval that defined the next decade.

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He was arrested in Alabama in 1961 while participating in the interracial Freedom Riders movement that challenged segregationist laws. He was later arrested in Baltimore and St. Augustine, Fla.

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Mr. Coffin offered men who refused to obey the draft the sanctuary of his Yale chapel in New Haven, Conn., an act that ushered one of the country's leading institutions of higher education into the debate about the war.

On Oct. 16, 1967, Mr. Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock led a demonstration in Boston at which nearly 1,000 men handed over draft cards. After the rally, dubbed "Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," Mr. Coffin helped present the draft cards to the Justice Department.

He, Spock and others were subsequently convicted of conspiracy to aid and abet disobedience of the Selective Service Act. The charges were overturned or dropped during the next few years. He also had a hand in retrieving three released U.S. prisoners of war in Hanoi in September 1972.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/12/AR2006041201736.html?nav=rss_email/components

*I know I posted a couple more paragraphs than I should have, mods, but hopefully you will forgive my disobedience in the spirit in which this disturber of the peace did it.:)