Paul Kingsley Chapman, clergyman, civil rights activist, champion of the less fortunate on land and sea, runner, sailor, singer and positive force for good wherever he lived or traveled, died on March 12. He was 91.
He was born Sept. 11, 1931 in Providence, R.I. to Elizabeth Burrows Kingsley Chapman and Charles Barnard Chapman. A memorial service was held in New York City in April, attended by friends from many parts of the world to pay tribute to a life well lived and always in the service of others.
An introvert by nature, a community builder and leader by conviction, he once described these contradictions in his memoir, Remembering: “Who am I? I like to have fun with my identity. When I used to order pizza I would give my name as Zagrodny.”
A longtime Vineyarder, Paul periodically lived on the Island full-time throughout different stages of his life, in homes he built himself, learning the craft while doing. He first arrived on Island shores as a baby.
In his memoir he includes a chapter called In and Out of the Vineyard Gazette (an Obituary) that begins this way: “Although Paul Chapman had been summering on Martha’s Vineyard since a month before he was born, he first came to light in the Vineyard Gazette when he contributed articles in the 1950s, describing the sailboat races of the Weetauqua Corinthian Club, a small yacht club of young sailors who raced on the Lagoon. Each week he would ride his bike from Oak Bluffs to the Gazette office where Mrs. Betty Hough always agreed to print the brief reports that he submitted.”
Paul graduated from Keene High School in New Hampshire in 1944, Brown University in 1953 and Andover Newton Theological in 1956. He also graduated from the School of Ecumenical Studies, Chateau de Bossey in Céligny, Switzerland in 1957.
He studied monastic movements and spent time with the Taizé Community in Saône-et-Loire, Burgundy, France. In 1957 he became the director of Packard Manse in Stoughton, a center for Jewish/Christian rapprochement and a base for the fight for civil rights, the poor and oppressed and opposition to the war in Vietnam. During his time at Packard Manse, Paul, along with his first wife, Lois Esther Stelley Chapman, and their four adopted children, spent a year living in a favela in Brazil.
In the 1960s he turned his attention to civil rights work, traveling to North Carolina. A passionate believer in non-violence, he was frequently jailed while helping to organize and demonstrate during the Civil Rights movement.
In his memoir he described his time in a Williamston, N.C jail as filled with apprehension and boredom. He wished that, like his heroes in the movements, he could make better use of his time behind bars.
“Although I had a book about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and plenty of time to read it, I was soon reduced to reading comic books and simply sitting, half dazed. I thought about the inspired works that had been written from prison, by Bonhoeffer, the Apostle Paul and M.L. King Jr, and marveled that they had overcome the debilitating jailhouse conditions to write inspired works. The single bare light bulb that hung in our cell did not symbolize new ideas to me,” he wrote.
But out of jail new ideas and ways of bringing people together were always at the forefront. In 1963 he helped organize a group of women from the Vineyard to travel to Williamston, N.C. to protest segregation.
In his memoir, again in the chapter In and Out of the Vineyard Gazette, he described the experience this way: “In the early sixties, Chapman appears again in the Gazette, this time as one of the local leaders of the Civil Rights movement. In October of 1963 he had been joined by the Rev. Henry Bird, rector of the Episcopal parish of the Vineyard, in a civil rights demonstration in Williamston, North Carolina. Subsequently, the Freedom Choir of Williamston — 50 young people — came to the island and held a demonstration in Vineyard Haven and a rally in the Whaling Church, which Chapman led. This was followed in the spring by several prominent Vineyard women going to Williamston and getting arrested there, protesting segregation.”
He moved to the Vineyard full-time in 1975 and, among other Island activities and accomplishments, he noted one in particular in his memoir: “After 43 years of summering here, Paul Chapman and family moved to Vineyard Haven in 1975 and he was immediately cast in Mary Payne’s Gospel and Passion plays, and we see him portrayed and reviewed as Jesus in this double production held at the Stone Church in Vineyard Haven during Lent, 1976.”
He took up running on the Vineyard in 1977 at age 45 and never stopped, describing it as a meditation as much as a form of exercise. “There is a special vibrancy in a life that runs well, and I’ve thought that the physical exercise of running (or biking or intentional walking) is a metaphor for a life that moves ahead apace with grace,” he wrote.
He moved to New York City and in 1979 started his work at the Seamen’s Church Institute. There he founded the Center for Seafarers’ Rights.
Paul was ordained by the Memorial Baptist Church in Harlem in 1980 and in 1982 he earned his doctorate degree from the New York Theological Seminary. His dissertation was The Human Rights of Seafarers. Paul’s book, Trouble on Board: The Plight of the International Seafarer, was published in 1992.
In 1994, he started the Employment Project in New York City and in 2005 helped found the Poverty Initiative, now Kairos – The Center for Religion, Rights & Social Justice.
In 2007 he moved with his wife Gayle to Glasgow, Scotland and was the catalyst for the first Poverty Truth Commission in Glasgow, an event that sparked a campaign that has now spread to other parts of the UK and Europe.
In his memoir he summed up his guiding principles in life: “Like my two grandfathers my goal has been usefulness, good health and the satisfaction of having contributed to justice and the general welfare.”
Paul is survived his wife Gayle Irvin; three children, Sarah Elizabeth Chapman, Rachel Rebekah Chapman and Timothy John Chapman; two step daughters, Lisa Gayle Lind and Laura Marie Pettus; numerous grandchildren, nieces and nephews; and brothers Donald Chapman of New Boston, N.H. and Philip Chapman of West Hartford, Conn. He was predeceased by his son Mark Andrew Chapman in 2022.
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