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Josephus Roosevelt Coan, Ph.D.
1902 - 2004
Reverend Dr. Josephus R. Coan passed over
into eternal life on February 6, 2004 at the age of one hundred
and one (101). An icon in Christian Education, he was a
faithful servant of God, family, community and to all whom he
taught and influenced.
With Simpson Coan deemed the paternal Primogenitor and Ralph and
Louise Foster, the maternal Primogenitors, Josephus R. Coan was
the fifth offspring of Andrew and Mary Ann Foster Coan born on a
farm in Orangeburg County.
Dr. Coan had a rich academic and professional background. He
received his early education in the rural schools of Orangeburg
County, South Carolina, and at the preparatory
academies first at Claflin University followed by South Carolina
State College where he as the class valedictorian on May 21,
1925 delivered an address entitled, "We have Crossed the
Bay; the Ocean Lies Before Us." Entering South Carolina
State as a college freshman the following year, where he was
elected class president, he transferred to Howard University in
1926 and received his B.A. in the Spring of 1930.
Entering Yale Divinity School in the
Fall of 1930, he received his B. D. degree in 1933.
At the time of his death, Dr. Coan was the oldest living alumnus
of Yale Divinity School and a focus of a research project by
that school. Through a scholarship by the philanthropist
Ms. Caroline Hazard, upon the unanimous recommendation of
his dean and two others of his favorite professors, he was
offered a scholarship to continue his studies at Yale.
Enrolled at Yale University graduate school from 1933-1934, and
with Dean Weigle as his chief advisor, Dr. Coan chose as
his thesis, "Daniel Allen Payne: Christian
Educator."
Ms. Hazard, after reading his thesis,
assisted in its publication. By now an avid researcher,
and after receiving an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from
Morris Brown College in recognition of his pioneering work in
laying the foundation of the present department of Christian
Education of the A.M.E. Church, Dr. Coan spent Summer 1949
at the Union Theological Seminary researching the planting of
the A. M. E. Church in South Africa. The result of that
research project, "The Influence of the African Methodist Church
upon the Culture/Religion of the South African Bantu
Tribes" (1950) is included in the Atlanta University
Summaries of Research Projects, 1947-1952 (1953).
During the year 1954-55, Dr. Coan registered in the
Hartford Seminary Foundation completing his residence
requirements for the doctoral program. Awarded the Ph.D.
degree in 1961, the title of his dissertation was
"The Expansion of Missions of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church in South Africa, 1896-1908."
Inextricably intertwined with Dr. Coan's scholarly journey was a
life of manual labor to support his rich scholarly endeavors and
a life of Christian labor to fulfill his Christian calling.
Ordained a Deacon in 1932 and an Elder in 1934, Dr. Coan
pastored churches in the states of Rhode Island and Georgia.
He served on the faculty at Morris Brown College where he was
College Minister and Chairperson of the Department of Philosophy
and Religion for twenty years. Following that service were
nineteen years at the Interdenominational Theological Center
where, in 1959, Dr. Coan became one of the original faculty
members, a position he would hold until his retirement in
1974.
For more than nine years, Dr. Coan resided and served in
Southern and Central Africa as an overseas Missionary of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the 1960s,
developing an idea of Bishop Wright's, he founded the R. R.
Wright School of Religion in what was during apartheid called
"The Trans Vaal " section, fifty miles away from
Johannesburg in Everton, the home of Steve Biko.
Dr. Coan was President and
Superintendent of the Wilberforce Institute, a school
providing elementary and secondary teacher training. While
he also served as Acting Bishop, his primary vocation was
teaching. An excerpt of an invitation from Bishop Adam
Richardson, presiding bishop of the same area of Dr. Coan's work
in South Africa, sheds light on the importance given to the
ten years of dedicated work by Josephus Coan. Bishop
Richardson's letter is to Ras Kofi Kwayana, teacher at Frederick
Douglass High School, Atlanta, and the son of Dr. Coan's niece,
Tchaiko Kwayana, to attend the dedication of a building at
the newly re-opened Wilberforce Community College:
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Wilberforce Community College of
Eaverton, South Africa will observe and celebrate the
Dedication of the Josephus Roosevelt Coan Distance
Learning Center and Faculty Housing Development.
As a great nephew of Dr. Coan, the Board of Trustees is
pleased to extend to you an invitation to attend this
signal event. The ceremony will take place on
Wednesday, September 24, 2003 at 2:00 p.m. on the
Wilberforce Campus. We are delighted that you will
be able to represent your family on this historic
occasion.
Dr. Coan spent nearly ten years in
South Africa during the early development of the
Wilberforce Institute and the R. R. Wright Seminary.
After a 40 year hiatus, following the infamous Bantu
Education Act of the former apartheid regime,
Wilberforce Institute has risen from the ashes as
Wilberforce Community College. A renaissance has
taken place with an infusion of nearly $6.1 million in
construction through the United States Agency for
International Development and its office of American
Schools and Hospitals Abroad.
It is only right and fitting that
this new phase of development be named in honor of this
scholar and servant, Dr. Josephus R. Coan. I am
sure that your family is as proud of his service as we
are grateful. He is highly regarded by the people
who love and support this educational enterprise of the
African Methodist Episcopal Church. We are pleased
that his name will be attached to this new development
in perpetuity.
We are also sure that this experience will assist you in
your pursuit of greater understanding of and
appreciation for Africa and her people. We are
certain that what you discover will find its way into
your classroom to the long-term benefit and delight of
the students you teach. |
At both the groundbreaking ceremony
symbolically on January 15, 2002 which Tchaiko Kwayana attended
and the opening of the Facility on September 24, 2003, the
effusive testimonies of male and female alumni of
Wilberforce Institute of the love and care their
"daddy," Dr. Coan, gave to them were profound.
Not only were these proud sons and daughters of Africa full of
praise for the quality of the academic instruction they received
but, with amusing anecdotes to back up their claims, they
were most impressed with how this man who lived in the
humble dorms with them, speaking their languages, taught them by
sometimes what they considered "extreme" examples how
important it was to fulfill responsibilities as mundane as
keeping the grounds clean and washing the dishes (called wares),
an important lesson for both genders.
Just as Dr. Coan's educational journey took this son of
sharecroppers in and out of the segregated South to the most
prestigious academic institutions in the nation, so also
did his wider scholarly and religious affiliations include an
impressive array of national and
international learned and professional societies.
With a research and publishing record no less stellar
including The Church's Educational Ministry: A Curriculum
Plan currently used by twenty-three constituent denominations
and theological seminaries throughout the United States, a
portion of his papers were officially opened to the public
at Emory University's Candler School of Theology's special
100th Birthday Party November 2002. They are housed
in The Special Collection Archives, a Division of Emory
University's Robert W. Woodruff Library.
Continuing the honors, The Interdenominational Theological
Seminary in the Fall of 2003 awarded Coan an Honorary Doctorate
degree. Perhaps one of the most far-reaching projects
spawned by Dr. Coan's life and work is The Yale Divinity
School's Students of Color Black History Project. Two Yale
Divinity School's professors who had found
him to be the oldest Yale Divinity School alumnus interviewed
him. They lead the researching of his tenure at that
institution and that of other students of African descent
over the decades. It is being studied with all its
racial and academic ramifications.
Dr. Coan was married to Sammye Coan who died in the 1970s;
Eloise Coan, his second wife, also preceded him in death.
Josephus R. Coan is survived by one brother-in-law, Mr. Emanuel
Poston of Columbia, SC; nieces Gwendolyn Gibbs and Dorothy Cook
McGrady (Uriah) of Atlanta; Mary Wilcher (Blucher) of Spring
Valley, NY; Vermelle Matthews (Eugene) of Beauford SC;
Tchaiko Kwayana (Eusi) of San Diego and Guyana; Gina Reeves
(Tim) of Tom's River, NJ; Eleanor Jackson (Wife of Bobby.)
The next generation of this family line begun by Simpson
Coan and Ralph and Louise Foster are these young adults, the
great nieces and nephews of Josephus Coan: Troy Matthews,
Shirley Wilcher Scott, Lisa Matthews Wigfall, Samuel Wilcher,
Olubayo Jackson, Kofi , Alaf Kwame, and IyaboEffua
Dorthula Kwayana, and Simone and Taylor Reeves. The
most recent generation are Bryce Wigfall, Afriye, Tegest, Yaa,
and Ina Kwayana, and Myria Scott. Josephus Coan leaves a
host of cousins throughout the USA from both the Foster and the
Coan Families and many friends.
Because the mission inspired by Dr. Josephus R. Coan must
go on, and as he has received many flowers while he lived, the
family asks that instead of flowers, donations be sent to the
Josephus R. Coan Foundation to be established to support
projects at home and at Wilberforce Community College, Eaverton,
South Africa. Dr. Coan served as Pastor and later Assistant
Pastor of St Mark A.M.E. Church, Atlanta, GA where homegoing
services will be conducted on Saturday, February 14th at 1p.m.
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Josephus Roosevelt Coan Papers (Emory)
Coan (b. 1902) is an AME minister, educator, and missionary to
South Africa (1938-1947). Diaries, notebooks, correspondence
with South African religious leaders, print material from the
AME Church in South Africa and Georgia, photographs, and a
number of rare books, including some from the library of the
late AME Bishop William A. Fountain. http://web.library.emory.edu/libraries/speccolls/announcements-aa.html
Daniel Alexander Payne: Christian Educator. Philadelphia: AME
Book Concern, 1935
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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update 28 July 2008
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