William Paul Coates (born July 4, 1946) is an American publisher, printer and community activist. In 1978, he founded the Black Classic Press (BCP), devoted to publishing works significant to people of African descent, particularly previously out-of-print books. He also established the printing company BCP Digital Printing in 1995. He is the father of author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

W. Paul Coates was born in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Edna Coates and Douglas Cryor. Leaving high school early, Coates enlisted in the U.S. Army; he found himself the target of harassment and racism, but he also happened upon Richard Wright's memoir Black Boy, which led Coates to discover other Black writers, such as Malcolm X, Dick Gregory, and James Baldwin. In 1965, Coates was sent to serve in Vietnam, where he worked as a military policeman in a K-9 unit. He was discharged in 1967.

Upon his return to the U.S., he settled in Baltimore, Maryland, and began working as a volunteer in the Black Panther Party's breakfast program. Becoming defense captain of the Baltimore Black Panthers, he was "in charge of managing all Panther activities in Maryland, including implementing free clothing and free food programs and housing assistance, before leaving the organization in 1971".

Using the G.I. Bill, which provided financial support for veterans to attend college, Coates earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in community development from the Homestead Montebello Center of Antioch University in Baltimore in 1979. He then obtained a master's degree in library science from Atlanta University in 1980. After completing his education, he worked at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center until 1991. He co-edited, with Elinor Des Verney Sinnette, Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History (Howard University Press, 1990).

In 1972, with other activists, he established the George Jackson Prison Movement to bring Afrocentric literature to Maryland jails and prisons, aiming to "retrieve the souls and minds of the incarcerated". The program was run from a bookstore Coates and another former Panther set up in 1973 called The Black Book, and he subsequently turned his efforts to founding, in 1978, the Black Classic Press (BCP), characterized as "a mission-driven publishing venture focused on preserving the collective story of African-American people". Originally headquartered in the basement of his home, with the company's first publications being pamphlets printed on a photocopier, BCP would survive over decades to become one of the longest-running continuous African-American book publishers, alongside Haki Madhubuti's Third World Press.

In 1995, Coates launched BCP Digital Printing to specialize in short-run printing, about which he said in 2018: "There are many publishing companies, but there's still only one Black book printing company in this country that I know of, and that's Black Classic Press."

An impactful landmark for BCP came in 1997 when author Walter Mosley granted the company publication rights to his novel Gone Fishin'—deliberately opting for an independent Black publisher and waiving his customary six-figure advance—and the novel became one of BCP's most successful titles, with sales of more than 100,000 copies. Among other notable contemporary and historical authors whose work has been published by BCP are John Henrik Clarke, E. Ethelbert Miller, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, Dorothy B. Porter, Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, W. E. B. Du Bois, Edward Blyden, J. E. Casely Hayford, Bobby Seale, John G. Jackson, Carter Woodson, and J. A. Rogers, with BCP specializing in works significant to people of African descent. As Coates says in the mission statement of BCP: "We began publishing because we wanted to extend the memory of what we believe are important books that have helped in meaningful ways to shape the Black diasporic experience and our understanding of the world."

Coates is a founding member and chair of the National Association of Black Book Publishers and has served as an adjunct instructor of African American Studies at Sojourner-Douglass College in Baltimore.