James Laney

James Thomas Laney — known to colleagues and friends simply as "Jim" — was a minister, scholar, and statesman whose life traced an arc from a small Arkansas town to the highest councils of American diplomacy, shaped at every turn by an enduring love for Korea and an unshakable belief that education is, at its core, a moral endeavor. Born on Christmas Eve, 1927, in Wilson, Arkansas, and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, Laney came of age working odd jobs in the Mississippi Delta — formative encounters he credited with grounding his sense of the world. After enrolling at Yale College, his studies were interrupted when, at nineteen, he was assigned to the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps in post-war Korea. "The experience in Korea so changed my thinking about the world," he would later say. He returned to Yale a different man, determined to enter the ministry. Laney graduated from Yale Divinity School in 1954 and was ordained as a United Methodist minister. After serving as a pastor in Cincinnati and chaplain at Choate School, he and his wife Berta returned to Korea as Methodist missionaries, where Laney also taught as associate professor of religion at Yonsei University in Seoul from 1959 to 1964. He earned his Ph.D. in Christian ethics from Yale in 1966 and joined Vanderbilt Divinity School before being called to Emory. As dean of Emory's Candler School of Theology from 1969 to 1977, Laney reshaped theological education — growing the faculty by nearly 50%, appointing the school's first African American full-time faculty member and its first female faculty member, and establishing the nation's first supervised ministry program, which became a national model for clergy training. In 1977, at age 49, Laney became Emory's 17th president. When Robert W. Woodruff and his brother George presented Emory with a transformational $105 million gift in 1979 — at the time the largest philanthropic gift in U.S. history — Laney channeled that generosity into a bold vision: distinguished faculty including former President Jimmy Carter, a new school of public health, landmark scholarships, and building programs that propelled Emory into the Association of American Universities by 1995. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed Laney U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, where his fluency in Korean, his decades of personal ties to the country, and his moral authority proved decisive. He was instrumental in defusing the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis and negotiating the Agreed Framework. Laney died at home on August 13, 2026, at age 98, held in the embrace of his beloved wife of 76 years. Each morning of those 76 years, they had begun the day with devotions; each evening, they ended it holding hands and reciting the Lord's Prayer together. Emory honored him by naming its graduate school the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies. His legacy endures in every institution he touched and every life he transformed.