Celebration of the life of Stephen M. Coleman, loving husband of Judith Coleman, devoted father of Stevie Lynn Coleman. Sunday, May 7th at Unity Christ Church, 33 No. Skinker Blvd. 63105. 1:00-Greet the family. 1:30-Omega Psi Phi Remembrance. 2:00-Memorial Service. In lieu of flowers please send donations to Wesley House (314)385-1000.
I have been happily married to Judith Fagen Coleman for twenty-nine years and we have a delightful twenty-four year-old daughter. After I received my B.A. from Amherst College in 1978, I earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business in 1980. I am a life member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. I have been ranked by PENSIONS & INVESTMENTS Magazine as one of best overall equity managers in the USA. I succeed because I buy Blue Chip Stocks and behave like a long-term investor. In 1994, I founded and became the majority shareholder of Daedalus Capital, L.L.C., a Chicago, IL-based equity management firm. I have served as the Chief Investment Officer of Daedalus since inception. Daedalus' annualized return since 1994 is 23%. Daedalus' annualized return for the past five years is 34% as of December 31, 2012. For the five-year period ending September 30, 2012, every separate account client of Daedalus Capital, L.L.C. earned at least a double on their investment at a time that most describe as the worst stock market since the Great Depression. That Black Studies degree from Amherst College set me up for life! Thanks.
STEPHEN M. COLEMAN MEMORIAL I thank God for the beauty, for the pageantry , the soulful symmetry of the St. Louis, Missouri, Memorial Service for my beloved younger brother Stephen Messiah Coleman, held yesterday, May 7, 2017, at the Unity Church at Washington U. Seeing old friends, visiting family and revisiting familiar places and memories perfectly presaged for me what was most moving, holy. The "home-going" ceremony itself that was masterfully officiated by my dear beloved brother, from/by another mother and father, Charles Homer Thomas, of: Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, television news media. The Omega Psi Phi Memorial Service that was preliminary to other program events, richly paid tribute to its departed lifetime member, Stephen M. Coleman, whose two blood brothers Anthony and Edwin Coleman, also served as fraternal ritualists, appropriately. Stevielynn Coleman, "Daddy's little girl ," recited a moving encomium to her Dad, accenting every range of emotion yet ending in gratitude. Mrs. Pamela Coleman Chance , vocalists Wesley Johnson and Alvin Coleman, silhouetted the "Now I See," eulogy that was delivered by Rev. Edwin Martin Coleman that also was profoundly, memorable, moving. Even the repast rocked in the basement with fried chicken! Thank Goodness and thank God!
I have been happily married to Judith Fagen Coleman for twenty-nine years and we have a delightful twenty-four year-old daughter. After I received my B.A. from Amherst College in 1978, I earned an M.B.A. from Stanford University, Graduate School of Business in 1980. I am a life member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. I have been ranked by PENSIONS & INVESTMENTS Magazine as one of best overall equity managers in the USA. I succeed because I buy Blue Chip Stocks and behave like a long-term investor. In 1994, I founded and became the majority shareholder of Daedalus Capital, L.L.C., a Chicago, IL-based equity management firm. I have served as the Chief Investment Officer of Daedalus since inception. Daedalus' annualized return since 1994 is 23%. Daedalus' annualized return for the past five years is 34% as of December 31, 2012. For the five-year period ending September 30, 2012, every separate account client of Daedalus Capital, L.L.C. earned at least a double on their investment at a time that most describe as the worst stock market since the Great Depression. That Black Studies degree from Amherst College set me up for life! Thanks.
He taught for 16 years at Mount Holyoke College before joining the University of Georgia in 1986 as the Constance E. Smith Fellow. McFeely won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1981 biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which portrayed the general and president in a harsh light. He concluded that Grant "did not rise above limited talents or inspire others to do so in ways that make his administration a credit to American politics."[4]
McFeely retired in 1997. He was a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study during the 2006–2007 academic year, where he studied Henry Adams and his wife Clover Adams, and Clarence King and his wife Ada Copeland King.[5] He was a visiting scholar and associate member of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department and an associate of their Humanities Center.
It is with deep sorrow that I report the death of Bill McFeely, one of the most distinguished members of our class and of our parent, Amherst College, since the days of its inception. Bill’s father was an alumnus of Amherst (1920), as were his son, Drake ’76, and grandson Matthew ’05.
After Amherst, Bill enjoyed success as a banker in New York City, but decided he needed a change of direction that would contribute to social progress in this country. He was accepted by Yale for its doctoral program under C. Vann Woodward, one of the primary academic leaders of the civil rights movement. Bill followed Woodward’s footsteps in a most distinguished way, promoting black studies with vigor and much success. Bill stayed on at Yale for four years after receiving his doctorate, during which time he taught Henry Louis Gates Jr., the great Harvard scholar.
After Yale, Bill became dean of Mount Holyoke College, where his combined academic and financial background was important during a difficult transition in the college’s management. He also became an outstanding professor in its history department. His seminal biography of Ulysses S. Grant won Bill a Pulitzer Prize as well as an honorary doctorate from Amherst.
After 16 years at Mount Holyoke, Bill left for the University of Georgia, where he taught for a little more than a decade. Retiring from active academic life, he became a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a scholar at Harvard’s African-American Studies Institute.
With Amherst now focusing so much on diversity and inclusion, it is a matter of great pride that our classmate was one of the earliest and most effective promoters of black studies.
Thank you Jack. William McFeely most definitely deserves recognition. I plan on finishing my list before the end of Summer. William McFeely will be remembered soon.
William S. McFeely in an undated photo. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant.Credit...Associated Press
William S. McFeely, a historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant but was also well known for advancing the field of black history, died on Wednesday in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. He was 89.
His son, W. Drake McFeely, said the cause was idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease.
Professor McFeely also wrote an acclaimed biography of Frederick Douglass as well as “Yankee Stepfather: General O.O. Howard and the Freedmen” (1968), a study of the Freedmen’s Bureau, set up by the government at the end of the Civil War to oversee the welfare of freed slaves, and the man who ran it.
These books and other writings established Professor McFeely as a leading interpreter of Reconstruction, the pivotal period after the Civil War.
“Via his books on Howard, Douglass and Grant,” the historian Eric Foner said by email, “McFeely played a major role in the re-evaluation of Reconstruction — seeing it not as an era of misgovernment and corruption as previous scholars too often did, but as a key moment, despite its flaws, in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country.”
Whatever his subject, Professor McFeely wrote in a style that was unusually accessible for academia.
“His prizewinning books, and especially his magnificent biographies, have made the past vivid for scholars and general readers alike,” the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, a former president of Harvard University, said by email.
William Shield McFeely was born on Sept. 25, 1930, in New York. His father, William C. McFeely, was an executive with Grand Union supermarkets, and his mother, Marguerite (Shield) McFeely, was a homemaker who did volunteer work.
Professor McFeely graduated from Ramsey High School in New Jersey and earned a bachelor’s degree in American studies at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1952. He seemed headed for a career in banking, but in 1960, after eight years at the First National City Bank of New York, he enrolled at Yale University to pursue a Ph.D. in American studies, which he received in 1966. His dissertation became “Yankee Stepfather,” published in 1968.
Professor McFeely taught at Yale until 1970, helping to establish the university’s Department of African American Studies and teaching a core course on African-American history. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, was among the black students in his class.
“Professor McFeely’s riveting lectures brought to life in the most vivid way a world about which most of us had been unaware,” Professor Gates wrote in an email, “a world of black achievement, sacrifice, resistance and attainment, facts and stories that had been edited out of standard American history textbooks.”
“Inevitably,” he added, “during question period, someone would stand up and rudely ask how a white man like him could dare to teach a black history class. Invariably, he responded, unfazed, that the person was absolutely right, that a black person should be hired, and would be hired one day, soon. But in the meantime, we should study our lecture notes and do next week’s reading for the class! I think even the most militant among us respected him enormously for the courage of that response.”
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“I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic or intellectual specialness,” Professor McFeely wrote. “He became general and president because he could find nothing better to do.”
In 1970 Professor McFeely became a history professor and dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He wrote “Grant: A Biography” (1981) while there. Others had mythologized Grant, but Professor McFeely’s book did the opposite.
“There are historians who, when asked to contemplate Grant, insist that he must have had some secret greatness, hidden within him, that allowed him to accomplish what he did,” Professor McFeely wrote.
“I am convinced that Ulysses Grant had no organic, artistic or intellectual specialness,” he continued. “He did have limited though by no means inconsequential talents to apply to whatever truly engaged his attention. The only problem was that until he was nearly 40, no job he liked had come his way — and so he became general and president because he could find nothing better to do.”
Professor McFeely took a similar approach in “Frederick Douglass,” published in 1991, five years after he moved to the University of Georgia.
“After all that has been written about Douglass,” Herbert Mitgang wrote in reviewing that book in The New York Times, “including some mythmaking by Douglass himself in three autobiographies, Mr. McFeely’s ‘Frederick Douglass’ has a freshness of fact and boldness of interpretation that is admirable.”
“This engaging and well-written work of literature suggests that the Age of Douglass was this nation’s greatest epoch,” Mr. Reed wrote. “People of humble origin transcended themselves. Former slaves rose to greatness and spoke with the eloquence of angels.”
Professor McFeely’s interests extended to other areas as well. After he was called as an expert witness in a legal case in Georgia, he became interested in the death penalty in that state. Immersing himself in the subject, he produced, in 1999, the book “Proximity to Death,” in which he, a death penalty opponent, observed a series of capital punishment cases and the work of the lawyers defending the accused.
“This book is simply a story of a few people living in one corner of the country who carry a large responsibility,” he wrote. “The dry boards of a Georgia courthouse creak into life when one person — a lawyer — in defiance of a society that no longer cares, goes about the tough, unpopular work of trying to keep us from killing his client.”
His most recent book was another departure, a biography of an artist: “Portrait: The Life of Thomas Eakins” (2006).
Professor McFeely’s wife of 66 years, Mary Drake McFeely, died in 2018. They moved to the Hudson River town of Sleepy Hollow in 2013 after living for years in Wellfleet, Mass., on Cape Cod. In addition to his son, he is survived by two daughters, Eliza and Jennifer McFeely; a sister, Jean Ann Kessler; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandson.
During his Yale tenure, a contentious time on American campuses, Professor McFeely sometimes felt the strain of being a white professor teaching black history. In a 2011 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, he recalled turning up to teach his black history class during the May Day turmoil of 1970, when the campus was the site of protests related to a Black Panthers trial.
He wrote an outline of the day’s lesson on the blackboard, but when he turned around to face the students, he got a surprise.
“I found myself looking down at three camouflage-clad men carrying automatic weapons,” he wrote in the article. “The spokesman — a black radical in town for the rally — said emphatically, ‘I’m closing this class down.’”
“With more presence of mind than confidence,” he continued, “I said that I didn’t think the statistics on the board made what we were going to talk about that morning irrelevant to events on campus.” On the board he had just written figures on the number of black men lynched in the United States. The three intruders backed down, and the class continued.
McFEELY--William Shield, son of William C. McFeely and Marguerite S. McFeely, born September 25, 1930, New York City, died December 11, 2019, Sleepy Hollow, NY. Survived by sister Jean Ann Kessler and children W. Drake McFeely (Karen), Eliza McFeely (Jeffrey Fischer), Jennifer McFeely (James Goodman), seven grandchildren and one great- grandson. Educated at Amherst College (BA) and Yale (PhD). Author of six books, including the Pulitzer Prize- winning "Grant: A Biography," and beloved teacher to generations of students. Professor at Yale, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Georgia. His family remember him with love and affection for a lifetime of adventures indoors and out. Donations in Bill's honor may be made to The Equal Justice Institute or Mass Audubon.
To plant trees in memory, please visit the Sympathy Store.
This profile appears with other deceased alums from the class of ’52 – Kenneth Brown and Ulric Haynes
William McFeely ‘52, historian and supporter of African-American Studies (1930- 2019)
Obituary and Tribute
William S. McFeely, a historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Ulysses S. Grant but was also well known for advancing the field of black history, died on Wednesday [in December, 2019] in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. He was 89. Said historian Eric Foner, “McFeely played a major role in the re-evaluation of Reconstruction — seeing it not as an era of misgovernment and corruption as previous scholars too often did, but as a key moment, despite its flaws, in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in this country.” Professor McFeely taught at Yale [from 1966] until 1970, helping to establish the university’s Department of African American Studies and teaching a core course on African-American history. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard scholar, was among the black students in his class. “Professor McFeely’s riveting lectures brought to life in the most vivid way a world about which most of us had been unaware,” Professor Gates wrote in an email, “a world of black achievement, sacrifice, resistance and attainment, facts and stories that had been edited out of standard American history textbooks.” In 1970 Professor McFeely became a history professor and dean of the faculty at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. He stayed 16 years then went to the University of Georgia. McFeely retired in 1997 and was a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, a currently a visiting scholar and associate member of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, and an associate of their Humanities Center.
From: skipjen2865@aol.com <skipjen2865@aol.com> Sent: Friday, May 15, 2026 6:43 PM To: Jack Hailey <jack@gacinstitute.org> Subject: Re: Charlie Stillman profile
Jack,
This is great! He seems to have been a great guy. Please add this to his profile.
What do you have for for Bill McFeely?
Everett
Amos Newport, born c. 1715 in Africa
Robert Purvis (1810-1898), abolitionist, likely attended Amherst Academy
Charles Thomson, janitor from 1850s into the 1890s
Henry Martin Tupper, Class of 1859 – founded Shaw University
Frank Alvin Hoser, class of 1875, teacher/mentor of W.E.B. Du Bois
F. Dwight Newport, athletic trainer for 42 years
Robert Gilbert “Gil” Roberts, janitor of Lord Jeffrey Amherst Club, died in 2002 at age 106
Lillie Bell Jenkins (1925 – 2010)
Nancy Louise Holt Miller (1926-2015) and Carol Holt Miller (c.1954– 1984)
William McFeely ‘52
Richard Romer ‘52
Ken Howard ‘66
Charlie Stillman ‘67
Richard O’Daniel, Dean during 1973
David Wills 1942-2024 – documentary history project on African American Religion
STEPHEN M. COLEMAN MEMORIAL I thank God for the beauty, for the pageantry , the soulful symmetry of the St. Louis, Missouri, Memorial Service for my beloved younger brother Stephen Messiah Coleman, held yesterday, May 7, 2017, at the Unity Church at Washington U. Seeing old friends, visiting family and revisiting familiar places and memories perfectly presaged for me what was most moving, holy. The "home-going" ceremony itself that was masterfully officiated by my dear beloved brother, from/by another mother and father, Charles Homer Thomas, of: Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, television news media. The Omega Psi Phi Memorial Service that was preliminary to other program events, richly paid tribute to its departed lifetime member, Stephen M. Coleman, whose two blood brothers Anthony and Edwin Coleman, also served as fraternal ritualists, appropriately. Stevielynn Coleman, "Daddy's little girl ," recited a moving encomium to her Dad, accenting every range of emotion yet ending in gratitude. Mrs. Pamela Coleman Chance , vocalists Wesley Johnson and Alvin Coleman, silhouetted the "Now I See," eulogy that was delivered by Rev. Edwin Martin Coleman that also was profoundly, memorable, moving. Even the repast rocked in the basement with fried chicken! Thank Goodness and thank God!
