John B. Wolf

John Burton Wolf (1925–2017), more often written as John Wolf or John B. Wolf, was senior minister of the All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma from 1960 until he became Pastor Emeritus in 1995 at the age of 70. He remained affiliated in emeritus status with All Souls until his death in September 2017. He was born in Bloomington, Illinois on September 6, 1925, to Walter and Helen (nee Young) Wolf and was raised there until he joined the U.S. Navy in World War II. (He served as a signalman in the South Pacific.) During the Korean War, he rejoined the military, and was commissioned as a Navy reserve chaplain.

Ministerial career Early in his career, Wolf served as the minister for Unitarian churches in Racine, Wisconsin and Meadville, Pennsylvania. His Meadville church was the Independent Congregational Church – Unitarian (now the UU Church of Meadville) from 1954 until 1960.

Wolf's own church has had to contend with its own tarnished past in race relations. In 1921, the same year as the infamous Tulsa Race Riot, All Souls church was co-founded by Richard Lloyd Jones, editor and publisher of the afternoon newspaper, the Tulsa Tribune. An inflammatory editorial allegedly appeared in the paper reporting an attempted assault of a young white woman by a young black man in the elevator of a downtown building on May 31, 1921. The Tribune article was said to have called for lynching of the man, who had been arrested by the Tulsa County sheriff. When the sheriff refused to turn the prisoner over to an armed mob that night, the frustrated mob members took out their rage on the main residential district of blacks living in Tulsa, burning, looting and killing indiscriminately. White civil and political leaders did nearly nothing to stop the riot until the district was essentially destroyed. Later, the alleged female victim changed her account, the alleged attacker was freed and released for lack of evidence, no one was tried for participating, newspapers of the day disappeared from newsstands (and even libraries) and a veritable "cone of silence" descended over the event for nearly four decades.

Wolf recalled later that he was cautioned by a member of his church that he should never talk about the riot from his pulpit when he began to expound on race relations. John Wolf was not a person to back down from such a controversy. He knew that continued silence would never heal the city, which had experienced significant damage – even when many of the physical scars had been erased. He demanded action through sermons and actions.

Dr. Wolf retired in 1995 as senior minister of All Souls, though he continued to live in Tulsa and remained affiliated with the church as minister emeritus until his death 22 years later.

Activities outside the church In addition to his pastoral responsibilities, Dr. Wolf gave generously of his time and energies to groups outside the church. Some of these activities included: Co-founded the Oklahoma branch of the American Civil Liberties Union; Served on the National Board of Planned Parenthood;

Family According to one obituary, John Wolf was survived by his wife of 65 years, Barbara N. Hudgins Wolf; their son, John David Wolf (married to Anita Jacobson Wolf); their daughter, Catherine Elizabeth Wolf; grandson, Aaron Michael Wolf-Johnson (Kayla Wolf-Johnson), and great-granddaughter Willow Rose Wolf-Johnson.