William V. S. Tubman Jr., Son of Liberia's Longest-Serving President, Dies at 93
President William V. S. Tubman meets U.S. President John F. Kennedy at the White House, October 1961 (file photo of his father, not of William Tubman Jr. himself). Photo: Robert L. Knudsen, White House / JFK Library, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
William V. S. Tubman Jr., son of former President William V. S. Tubman and son-in-law of President William R. Tolbert Jr., has died at age 93. Known as "Shad," he survived the 1980 coup and spent decades in public life.
William V. S. Tubman Jr., son of Liberia's longest-serving president, William V. S. Tubman, has died at the age of 93. Widely known by his nickname "Shad," he was born in 1933 and lived through some of the most consequential decades of modern Liberian history, both inside and at times at odds with his own family's hold on power.
Tubman Jr. was also tied by marriage to a second Liberian head of state: he was the son-in-law of President William R. Tolbert Jr., having married Tolbert's daughter, Wokie. That connection placed him at the center of Liberia's political establishment across two administrations, first under his father and then under his father-in-law.
In the 1950s he was appointed head of the country's Congress of Industrial Organizations, and he went on to serve as a senator during both the Tubman and Tolbert presidencies. Unlike much of the political elite of his generation, he was known for publicly disagreeing with his father's positions, advocating for greater political inclusion of Liberia's tribal population at a time when Americo-Liberian settler descendants dominated the country's politics.
Tubman Jr. survived the violent April 12, 1980 coup that killed President Tolbert, his father-in-law, and ushered in more than a decade of military and civil upheaval in Liberia. He was in Norway and New York at the time of the coup and did not return to Liberia for more than a month afterward. He later became affiliated with the Reformed United Liberia Party.
No cause of death or funeral arrangements have been announced. Tubman Jr.'s death closes another link to Liberia's pre-civil-war political order, a generation whose contradictions, his own willingness to break from his father's line among them, still shape debates over inclusion and representation in Liberian politics today.