J. C. (John Clay) Coleman

Born in Mississippi to parents who had been enslaved, John Clay Coleman became an American-Canadian minister, theologian, and Black rights advocate. He traveled to Canada to pursue ordination in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and studied at Victoria University in Toronto, where he was noted as the institution's first Black student.

Coleman is best remembered for his 1898 book The Jim Crow Car; Or, Denouncement of Injustice Meted Out to the Black Race. In it, he challenged segregation and racial violence in the American South, combining personal testimony, protest, and religious argument in a way that still feels strikingly immediate.

He died young in 1911, but his writing remains an important record of resistance to Jim Crow. For listeners today, his work stands out not only as history, but as a clear moral appeal from someone who refused to accept injustice as normal.