NEW YORK — Leslie W. Dunbar, a civil-rights activist who used his influence at private groups to support black voter registration in the South, programs to reduce hunger among African-American children, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, died Jan. 4 at his home in New Orleans. He was 95.

Dr. Dunbar, a white West Virginian, was not a well-known figure in the constellation of civil-rights leaders like King, Ralph Abernathy or Roy Wilkins. But he found a way to wed his liberalism to the cause of racial equality by pushing the Southern Regional Council, a politically moderate biracial civic and business group in Atlanta, into a more aggressive civil-rights role.

“We were working within a context of a great historic mind-changing,’’ Dr. Dunbar said in a 1978 interview for the Southern Oral History Program Collection at the University of North Carolina. “Our role was to be something of a guide to it.’’

Historians compared him to other leading white liberals like Ralph McGill, antisegregation publisher of The Atlanta Constitution.

“They were all polite, a little beleaguered, and conscious of the limitations they were up against,’’ said Taylor Branch, the civil-rights historian. “Les Dunbar was quiet, kind of like a nonevangelical preacher. But his personality was suited to his mission.’’

Dr. Dunbar taught at Mount Holyoke College before joining the Southern Regional Council as research director in 1958, becoming executive director three years later.

“When he came to the SRC it was a pretty cautious organization, not quick to condemn segregation outright,’’ said Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, a history professor at the University of North Carolina who worked at the council after Dr. Dunbar’s time there. “I think Les really connected it to the grass-roots civil-rights movement as it gained momentum.’’

Most important, he played a critical role in the creation of the Voter Education Project, which aimed to register disenfranchised black voters in the Deep South.

“He oiled the gears to make the VEP come together,’’ said T. Evan Faulkenbury, a history professor at the State University of New York at Cortland who is writing a book about the project. “He talked to philanthropists up north and Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department to create the tax conditions under which it could exist, to have tax-exempt money go to voter registration.’’

By the time the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, the Voter Education Project had registered 700,000 black voters.

Leslie Wallace Dunbar was born Jan. 27, 1921, in Lewisburg, W.Va. the youngest of 10 children of Marion Leslie Dunbar, whose real estate and sawmill businesses were wiped out during the Great Depression, and the former Minnie Lee Crickenberger.

In 1933, young Leslie, his parents and his four surviving siblings (five others had died) moved to Baltimore.

Although he did not have all his undergraduate credits, he was admitted to graduate school at Cornell University, where he earned a master’s degree and a PhD. In addition to Mount Holyoke, he also taught political science at Emory University and was head of community affairs at the Atomic Energy Commission heavy water plant in Aiken, S.C.