RALEIGH - W.W. "Bill" Finlator, the outspoken former pastor of Raleigh's Pullen Memorial Baptist Church, and one of the South's leading liberal preachers during the 1960s civil rights movement, has died at age 93.

Finlator, a passionate preacher, controversial pastor and longtime political activist, died Monday night of pneumonia after a period of declining health, said his son, Wallace Finlator Jr., a Raleigh environmental lawyer.

The Rev. Finlator, a Louisburg native who grew up in Raleigh, led Pullen for 26 years, from 1956 to 1982, during which he championed civil rights and opposed the Vietnam War.

In his active retirement, Finlator continued writing and speaking out against war, poverty and the death penalty, and in favor of civil liberties, women's rights, workers' interests, and the separation of religion and the government. He was a frequent contributor of opinions in the editorial pages of The News & Observer.

"He thought the German theologian Karl Barth was right that a preacher should preach with a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other," Wallace Finlator Jr. said Tuesday. "He thought of himself as imitating Jesus, and trying to bring justice to the poor and peace to the world."

Finlator last year was among the original inductees into Raleigh's Hall of Fame. Before taking Pullen's pulpit, he led congregations in Pittsboro, Weldon and Elizabeth City.

Many Christians and other North Carolinians disagreed with Finlator's liberal views and his political activism. Most of his own deacons did, too, when they pressured him to retire a generation ago after he called on the federal government to deny funding to the University of North Carolina system for its shortcomings in achieving racial integration. By implication, he had faulted his church's next-door neighbor and the employer of many of its members, N.C. State University.

One mock epitaph offered when he retired was, "In this grave lies W.W. He's no longer here to trouble you, trouble you."

A 'free pulpit'

But the "very individual individual" was a towering figure among the South's politically minded clergy, and one of North Carolina's most fervent activists.

"Bill Finlator was a fearless man, and a gentle man," said one of his closest friends, fellow pastor Bob Mullinax of Raleigh, the former executive director of the state Baptist Convention's Council on Christian Higher Education. "He could bristle in the face of social injustice, and melt when a friend walked into the room."

Because Finlator routinely led his peers in insight and courage, Mullinax said, he often was misunderstood as a troublemaker and an irritant. His frequent attempts to introduce liberal-minded resolutions to the annual Baptist State Convention, for example, rarely succeeded immediately. But sometimes the group adopted his views a decade or more later.

"He was a preacher, a writer, a prophet and a good friend to many beyond his congregation," Mullinax said. "We will miss him badly."

William Wallace Finlator was born June 19, 1913, in Louisburg to a devout Baptist family. As a student at nearby Wake Forest College, Finlator wasn't sure he wanted to be a minister. But once so called, he never stepped back. He earned his divinity degree at the leading Southern Baptist seminary of the day, in Louisville, Ky.

On his return to North Carolina, he pastored churches in Weldon, Pittsboro and Elizabeth City before accepting the invitation to lead Pullen Memorial in Raleigh. One reason Finlator was attracted to Pullen was that church leaders promised him a "free pulpit" to speak his mind.

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