The New Spiritual Leader on Campus
On May 24, 1961, the Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. led a group of Freedom Riders on a 160-mile bus ride from Atlanta, Georgia, to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest segregation laws. The voyage and his subsequent arrest turned Coffin into a national figure in the fight for civil rights. Yet even as he made headlines, Coffin remained committed to another, quieter aspect of his role as a college chaplain.