William Wallace Finlator passed from this life Monday night. He was 93.

Maybe it was more than chance that Bill Finlator bore the same name as Braveheart -- so many called the causes he supported "lost."

We used to go to Raleigh to visit our friends, the Ray family. James Ray worked for the Baptist State Convention, and they went to Pullen Memorial Baptist Church on the corner close to N.C. State. One time I did a magic show there. I must have been all of about 12.

The preacher was a man everybody called "Brother Bill" in the old-time Baptist way. As a boy, I didn't know he was a radical. I just knew him as a nice man with a quiet voice, a firm handshake and a warm smile. He was a good preacher, too.

And when the Baptists fired Ray, this preacher stood by him -- just as he stood by a lot of others over the years, as I would come to find out.

People started calling Brother Bill a liberal, and a communist, and all the other names that get passed around all the time by folks Clarence Darrow called "people with stolen money in their pockets."

He preached with "a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other" as his son said recently. Some of the things he said must have sounded strange, as if he really thought the judgment of God Almighty would hold us all to strict account for every hungry person, every dead human being killed by "collateral damage" and every injustice.

Brother Bill taught that God is always on the side of the down-and-out, the poor, the weak, the mistreated -- and we should be on God's side, and theirs, too. He taught that folks who follow Jesus love their enemies, since anybody can love their friends.

He thought working people had the right to join together in labor unions and negotiate in their own interest. He marched for civil rights and against wars way before TV cameras started showing up, way back when everybody knew those were hopeless causes.

He stood for peace and against war. He urged people to act against injustice, and he acted against it. He took unpopular stands, often literally.

Sometimes he stood vigil outside Central Prison, sometimes outside the General Assembly, sometimes outside a courthouse -- sometimes saying more in a silent vigil than in his eloquent sermons.

He said it was more important for the government to obey its own law, its own Constitution, than it was for it to put the Ten Commandments up in classrooms or courtrooms. He opposed the death penalty, the war in Vietnam, and all the rest of them.

He stood for equal treatment for everybody, even women, even black people.

Even me, and even you.

When, as a student in the middle of a junior year studying nuclear engineering, I had doubts about the course of my life, I knew who to go to. In his office at Pullen, we talked and prayed. He didn't give me any particular answers. He supported my trying to find them out myself.

He wrote for the Raleigh papers. He wrote for The Pilot. He wrote letters to editors and letters to governments. He wrote and preached, and he stood with the downtrodden, with women alone, with undocumented aliens and racial outcasts and with the condemned.

There is an old labor song that was picked up again by The Movement. It goes, "Which side are you on, boy? Which side are you on?"

We never asked which side Finlator was on. We never had to ask. That question had already been asked and answered long ago. They called him a liberal, a radical, a rabble-rouser, and worse. Pullen itself eventually rejected him, perhaps for not rejecting others. Perhaps he was, at last, one of the last of the real Baptists. His biographer called Finlator a "dissenter in the Baptist Southland."

Bill Finlator wasn't trying to dissent. It just worked out that way sometimes. He never thought of himself as doing other than trying to follow Jesus.

Somebody will say, "I was hungry, and you fed me; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was an alien, and you took me in -- naked, and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came unto me. …"

Now William Wallace Finlator is gone, his voice is silent, his pen laid down -- but you know what he'd say.

Now it's our turn.