The white cleric was a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- The Rev. Will D. Campbell, an unconventional preacher who stood with demonstrators against segregation in Nashville and throughout the South and also ministered to leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, died late Monday night.
He was 88.
Campbell's life was so true to Christian ideals that he was sometimes mystifying, friends said. His message of humility and love reached the likes of student leaders in the civil rights movement, including Bernard Lafayette and future Congressman John Lewis, as he cautioned them to love everyone — even those who persecuted them. In 1968, he was the lone white man to join those grieving in Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis hours after the assassination of his friend, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
"He didn't go out and advocate for things, he just demonstrated it with his own behavior in how he treated people," said Lafayette, who shared a hat fetish with Campbell and would trade them during occasional visits.
"He realized he needed to spend more time with the people who were misguided and those who harbored racist attitudes. The Klansmen were members of his own community and he needed to minister to them. He was his own person."
ADDITIONAL HISTORY: Gannett's Civil Rights in America website
For 40 years — until a May 2011 stroke left him confined to a Nashville medical facility — Campbell broadened his ministry. His life and literary works earned him the respect of former President Jimmy Carter, writer and poet Robert Penn Warren and an array of country music legends.
"He used the force of his words and the witness of his deeds to convey a healing message of reconciliation to any and all who heard him," Carter said.
Campbell was known as the music preacher — having presided over weddings, funerals and baptisms for some of country music's biggest icons. As a singer-songwriter, he spent much of the 1970s and '80s in the company of Tom T. Hall, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson and others.
"Will Campbell was a part of our family for years," Hall said. "He married those who were in love, tried to reconcile those with hate, buried our dead and tolerated the rest of us."
Campbell found a voice for racial equality and became a troubleshooter while working as the Nashville representative for the National Council of Churches from 1956 to 1963. He was an eyewitness that somber September morning in 1957 when nine students tried unsuccessfully to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.
When students took up the fight for equality in Nashville, Campbell stood with them. He offered moral support after an elementary school was bombed. He was personally invited by King to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta.
"I have seen and known the resentment of the racist, his hostility, his frustration, his need for someone upon whom to lay blame and to punish," Campbell wrote in his first book, "Race and the Renewal of the Church," later quoted in Rolling Stone magazine. "With the same love that it is commanded to shower upon the innocent victim of his frustration and hostility, the church must love the racist."
In Nashville, he joined forces with King and the Revs. James Lawson and Kelly Miller Smith in fighting segregation, though he called himself a "bootleg preacher" and for most of his ministry never had his own church. He was a son of the segregated South but urged people to be decent to one another.
"I remember thinking this is what I will do with the rest of my life … trying to rectify the evils of racial injustice," Campbell said in an Alabama public television documentary called "God's Will."
While he was guided by faith, he also was well-connected, regarded as a voice understood by businessmen and politicians.
To the students, he was a white Southern man they knew they could trust. He urged Lawson to stay the course instead of resign from Vanderbilt University's Divinity School after backlash for his work training students for the nonviolent sit-ins. He loaned the Freedom Riders his National Council of Churches telephone credit card, to keep them from having to travel with pockets full of change.
"He was a person committed to social justice when there were relatively few Southern white people who were courageous enough to admit they believed in racial justice," said Diane Nash, a student leader of the movement.
But Campbell didn't carry any sense of mission accomplished, even as Nashville and the rest of the South integrated. He believed the real heroes were the students who fought against oppression.
"During the sit-in movement, he became a confidante and a counselor to many black and white participants in the movement," Lewis said. "Will Campbell was a sage. He was a gift to America who never received the recognition he truly deserved."
Campbell was born on July 18, 1924, on an 80-acre cotton farm in southern Mississippi. He was the son of farmers and attended public schools when not working in the field and garden with his parents.
He was ordained a Baptist minister at 17. After a brief stint in the U.S. Army, he married Brenda Fisher. The couple moved to North Carolina, where Mr. Campbell earned a bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University. He attended graduate school at Tulane University for a year and then entered Yale University Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1952.
He then landed in Taylor, La., as pastor of the Taylor Southern Baptist Church. Campbell left Louisiana in 1954 to become the coordinator of campus ministries at the University of Mississippi. His tenure in Oxford ended in 1956 when he was eased out for consorting with a local black minister and inviting a noted white integrationist to speak on campus.
His departure led him to Nashville. He settled on a small farm near Mount Juliet, where he and his wife raised three children. He built a national reputation as a writer and a speaker but became better known as the minister to a flock of unconventional Christians.
In the years after the civil rights movement, he campaigned against abortion, the death penalty and the first military invasion of Iraq.
"He operated out of a love frequency that few of us ever imagine," said the Rev. Bill Barnes, a Nashville civil rights leader who visited Campbell each Wednesday during his illness. "There are a lot of people who have compassion, but Will wasn't afraid to go where compassion would lead him."
Campbell is survived by his wife of 66 years, two daughters, a son, four grandchildren and one brother.
Contributing: Michael Cass and Peter Cooper
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