Rev. Nico Smith | Apartheid protester, 81

The Rev. Nico Smith, 81, a white minister who defied his racist upbringing in South Africa by living in a black township and leading a congregation there while organizing protests against apartheid, died June 19 in Pretoria. He had a heart attack, according to a statement by the African National Congress, the South African political party with which he worked closely.

From 1985 to 1989, Mr. Smith and his wife, Ellen, lived in Mamelodi, the main black township outside Pretoria. They were the only South African whites for hundreds of miles to have received official permission to breach a pillar of apartheid called the Group Areas Act, which determined residential areas by race. Mr. Smith had begun preaching in Mamelodi in 1982 as a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Africa, a breakaway denomination of the segregationist Dutch Reformed Church.

He regularly demanded inquiries into the killings of antiapartheid activists. In 1988, he helped organize an effort aimed at racial reconciliation in which, for four days, 170 whites moved in with black families in Mamelodi and 35 blacks lived in the homes of whites in the suburbs of Pretoria.

The Smiths moved back to a white neighborhood in 1989. After apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s, Mr. Smith helped build a multiracial congregation in Pretoria.

After studying in Pretoria, Mr. Smith was ordained by the Dutch Reformed Church, which found scriptural justification for apartheid. But in 1963 he met Karl Barth, a renowned German-Swiss theologian, who confronted his racist thinking.

"He said to me, 'Will you be free to preach the Gospel even if the government in your country tells you that you are preaching against the whole system' " of apartheid? Smith said in a New York Times article. "That made a deep impression on me." - N.Y. Times News Service