The Rev. Jesse Cavileer, a pastor at Unitarian Universalist churches for more than a half-century, fed furnaces at steel mills, pulled onions with migrant workers, and rode the back of buses with black ministers in a segregated South.

He said God told him to do it.

Mr. Cavileer, 87, died of natural causes last Friday at Allegheny General Hospital.

For 19 years, he led North Side's Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church. When he retired in 1985, he didn't put away his Bible, but served as a fill-in minister at seven Western Pennsylvania Unitarian Universalist congregations.

Social action was woven into the fabric of Mr. Cavileer's ministry. "The minister should not coerce social action, but invite it, especially by example," he wrote in a 1988 sermon.

"He had years of preparation and preaching on Sunday morning," said his friend and colleague Tom Kerr, who along with Mr. Cavileer was a member of the Pittsburgh branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"You name a headline -- Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War -- and Jesse gave cogent sermons on all the events."

Mr. Cavileer lived simply. He walked, took public transportation and read a lot. He had no eye for fashion, chuckled his friend, Marilyn Detwiler, who worked with him on the Central North Side Neighborhood Council.

For as long as Detwiler knew him, he rented rooms or lived in a small apartment. In his later years, he went to the Senior Citizens Center every day for lunch.

"He never stopped being active," said Detwiler, "and really devoted himself to the causes he believed in."

Racial separation tainted Mr. Cavileer's boyhood in rural Maryland and New Jersey. In high school, he fought back by teaming with black classmates to produce a play on prejudice.

In college, at Syracuse University in 1936, he organized a student NAACP chapter. After college he headed for the deep South, where he was a Freedom Rider and was arrested for challenging Jim Crow laws. In the 1960s, he did civil rights work, traveling to Mississippi and Alabama to research segregation.

Mr. Cavileer also wrote plays, and his research has been archived at Harvard Divinity School and the Yale Library.

He skipped second and sixth grades as a child and graduated high school second in his class. He chopped wood to pay for college during the Depression and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1940 from Syracuse, where he majored in Bible and philosophy. Five years later, he earned a master of divinity from Union Theological Seminary.

In 1949, he worked in an open-hearth furnace in a Youngstown steel mill. A decade later he was teaching social theory in Glasgow, Scotland, while leading a Unitarian church there. Before he left, a year later, he was working at a Scottish steel mill. He taught classes in world religions in colleges and churches. He served at churches in the Midwest before coming to Pittsburgh in 1966.

Mr. Cavileer crusaded for working people. Along with challenging discrimination, he pushed for better conditions for migrant workers and better housing and organized unions.

He presided over the North Side Committee on Human Resources and served on the board at the YMCA, Pittsburgh Neighborhood Alliance and the University of Pittsburgh's Social Work Advisory Review.

Through frail, Mr. Cavileer -- a championship runner who qualified for the 1936 Berlin Olympics -- pushed on. Two weeks ago, he walked the streets in a North Side protest of slumlords.

"A couple of weeks ago, he was planning things, talking about the past, present and future of the church," said Linda Deafenbaugh, clerk of the Allegheny Unitarian Universalist church.

He is survived by a brother, David Cavileer, of Egg Harbor City, N.J.

A memorial service for Mr. Cavileer is scheduled for July 10 at the Allegheny Unitarian Universalist Church. Donations can be made payable to the church, 416 W. North Ave., Pittsburgh 15212.