Josephus R. Coan

Josephus Roosevelt Coan was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina on November 26, 1902. He graduated as valedictorian from South Carolina State College in 1924, earned a bachelor's degree from Howard University in 1930, and graduated from Yale Divinity School with a master’s in Christian education in 1933. He later earned a PhD from Hartford Seminary in 1961.

Coan dedicated his career to religious education and missionary work in service of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, in which he was ordained a deacon in 1932 and an elder in 1934. Immediately after graduating from Yale, he taught at Morris Brown College and Turner Theological Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia (1933-1938), before turning to missionary work in South Africa in 1938. In South Africa he was a founder of the R. R. Wright School of Religion, a part of the Wilberforce Institute, and became the Institute’s first Black superintendent in 1940. That same year he also became a bishop for the AME Church in the larger southern African region, a position which he would occupy until his return to the US.

In 1948 Coan returned to his educational work at Morris Brown College, where he served as chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion until 1974. He also worked on the faculty of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta from 1959 until the mid-1970s. Coan retired in the 1970s and lived until his death in 2004, at the age of 101.