Dr. Smith “sacrificed his well-being and forsook his privileged white status to join hands and lead the struggle for the emancipation of black people.”

The Rev. Nico Smith, 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 Saturday in Pretoria. He was 81.

The cause was a heart attack, according to a statement by the African National Congress.

Dr. Smith “sacrificed his well-being and forsook his privileged white status,” the statement said, “to join hands and lead the struggle for the emancipation of black people.”

From 1985 to 1989, some of the most climactic years of the struggle, Dr. 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. Dr. 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.

While a minister there, he regularly demanded inquiries into the killings of anti-apartheid 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.

Read More: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/world/africa/22smith.html