Robert McFadden

Newton N. Minow, who as President John F. Kennedy’s new Federal Communications Commission chairman in 1961 sent shock waves through an industry and touched a nerve in a nation addicted to banality and mayhem by calling American television “a vast wasteland,” died on May 6 at his home in Chicago. He was 97. On May 9, 1961, almost four months after President Kennedy called upon Americans to renew their commitment to freedom around the globe, Mr.

Ernest F. Hollings, known as Fritz, a silver-haired South Carolina Democrat who served 38 years in the US Senate, died on April 6 at age 97. Hollings, who retired in 2004, had successfully pushed for broadcast cable regulation.

Roger Wilkins, who championed civil rights for black Americans for five decades as an official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a foundation executive, a journalist, an author and a university professor, died in Kensington (MD). He was 85.

A black lawyer in the corridors of power, Mr. Wilkins was an assistant United States attorney general, ran domestic programs for the Ford Foundation, wrote editorials for The Washington Post and The New York Times, taught history at George Mason University for nearly 20 years and was close to leading lights of literature, music, politics, journalism and civil rights. Roy Wilkins, who led the NAACP from 1955 to 1977, was his uncle. Roger Wilkins’s early mentor was Thurgood Marshall, the renowned civil rights lawyer who became the Supreme Court’s first black associate justice. And he organized Nelson Mandela’s triumphant eight-city visit to the United States in 1990 as millions turned out to see that living symbol of resistance to apartheid after his release from 27 years in prison in South Africa.

John Brademas, a political, financial and academic dynamo who served 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of New York University in an all-but-seamless quest to promote education, the arts and a liberal agenda, died on July 11 in Manhattan. He was 89. His death was announced by NYU.

Brademas liked to say that being a university president was not much different from being a congressman: You shake hands, make speeches, remember names and faces, stump for a cause and raise money relentlessly. The difference, he said, is that you do not have to depend on voters to renew your contract every two years. As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Brademas became known as Mr. Education and Mr. Arts. He sponsored bills that nearly doubled federal aid for elementary and secondary education in the mid-1960s and that created the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. He was also instrumental in annual financing of the arts and humanities and in the passage of Project Head Start, the National Teachers Corps and college tuition aid and loan programs.

[Brademas served on the Board of Directors of the Benton Foundation from 1981 through 1992]