Beach, William Waldo, 1916-2001.

William Waldo Beach was born in 1916 in Middletown, Connecticut. He received his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1937 and his B.D. and Ph.D. from Yale in 1940 and 1944, respectively. He was ordained as a minister of the United Methodist Church. Beach taught at Antioch College before joining the faculty Duke's Divinity School in 1946, where he served as Director of Graduate Studies from 1959-1969 and specialized in Christian ethics, racial politics, ecology and technology. He supervised the dissertation of the first black Ph.D. graduate of the Duke Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and fought for racial integration in the Duke Chapel. He also served appointments at the Union Theological Seminary, the Pacific School of Religion, Colorado College, Northwestern University and Texas Christian University. In 1969, his book Christian Community and American Society was published by Westminster Press. The longest-tenured professor in the history of the Divinity School, Beach retired from Duke in 1986. He was also an active composer and sang with the Durham Civic Choral Society for over 40 years. He died in 2001.

From the guide to the Waldo Beach Papers, 1949-1986, (University Archives, Duke University)

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