Rev Will Campbell

The Rev Will Campbell, who has died aged 88, was a renegade Southern Baptist minister who became a key figure in the US civil rights movement. He stood by the famous Little Rock Nine, the black students who faced an angry white mob when they tried to enter a racially segregrated school in Arkansas. He was also the only white man admitted to the founding meeting of Martin Luther King's civil rights The Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Later, Mr Campbell campaigned for equal rights for women and gay people.

He was born in Amite County, Mississippi, into a poor family and survived a serious bout of pneumonia when he was five. When he was seven, he joined his cotton farmer father's Baptist church and began leading prayer meetings.

He was ordained in 1941 and when the Second World War broke out, joined up and served as an orderly in a military hospital. After the war, he earned a master's in English literarture from Tulane University and a bachelor's degree of divinity from Yale in 1952. He was then hired as a pastor at Taylor Southern Baptist Church in Louisiana where he began to formulate his radical and often controversial views.

After moving to Nashville, he joined the civil rights movment. He was the Nashville representative of a pro-integration operation called the National Council of Churches. Because he was white, he was allowed entry into rooms unapproachable by some of those at the forefront of the movement.

"When we had the sit-ins, Will would show up," Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights leader in Nashville and close friend of Mr Campbell, said. "We knew there was somebody who cared and was concerned about what happened to us. He was reminding us that there were some white people who believed in what we were doing."

In 1957, Mr Campbell was the only white man invited by Luther King to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The same year, he accompanied the Little Rock Nine group of students as they tried to enter the Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. A white mob was waiting for them and they failed although they succeeded the next day, accompanied by federal troops.

Later, Mr Campbell spoke out against the war in Vietnam and capital punishment but also attracted criticism for extending what he called his ministry of reconciliation to the Ku Klux Klan, becoming their pastor. Civil rights campaigner Rev James Lawson said: "He often got taunted because he was a pastor for the KKK. He did a number of their weddings and baptisms. Then he turned around and did one for our finest friends and colleagues. So I think that was his strength. He was on the human side, no matter what human."

Mr Campbell's own view of his approach was "if you're going to love one, you've got to love them all". Former President Jimmy Carter said: "Brother Will, as he was called by so many of us that knew him, made his own mark as a minister and social activist in service to marginalised people of every race, creed and calling. 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."

Mr Campbell, who was the author of more than a dozen books, most famously his memoir Brother to a Dragonfly in 1977, is survived by his wife, son and two daughters.