Chuck Stone, 89, Fiery Columnist

Chuck Stone, whose columns for The Philadelphia Daily News denouncing racism, political corruption and police brutality inspired such trust that wanted criminals sometimes surrendered to him rather than to the police and the authorities called on him to mediate prison crises, died on Sunday in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 89.

The death was confirmed by his daughter Krishna, who said her father had congestive heart failure. He had been a professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina.

Mr. Stone, who was a writer and editor for The Daily News from 1972 to ‘91, was the paper’s first black columnist and among the founders, in 1975, of the National Association of Black Journalists. He was also its first president.

Mr. Stone wrote colorful, propulsive prose with a wide range of cultural references, as likely to quote Rousseau or Abraham Lincoln as to break into the argot of black youth; he had street and statehouse cred.

His subject range was expansive as well — national and local politics, black history, civic and individual morality and always issues of race. Earlier in his career, when he worked for black newspapers in New York, Chicago and Washington — he covered the White House for The Washington Afro-American during the Kennedy administration — he was a fierce advocate for civil rights and black power. As a writer and editor for The New York Age, a paper based in Harlem, he befriended Malcolm X and Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., for whom he subsequently worked as an aide. He was fired from his job as editor in chief of The Chicago Defender when he refused to relent in his withering criticism of the city’s mayor, Richard J. Daley.

By the time he landed in Philadelphia, Mr. Stone was no less passionate, but his views had become more nuanced and independent. In the 1970s, he persistently criticized the city’s white mayor, Frank Rizzo, the former police commissioner whose department had an especially contentious relationship with the black community, and in the 1980s he persistently criticized the black mayor, Wilson Goode, for ineptitude, especially in 1985, after the mayor authorized the police bombing of a rowhouse inhabited by a radical black group known as MOVE, a calamitous event that started a destructive fire, killing 11 people, including five children.

Liberal on most social issues, Mr. Stone was in favor of the death penalty, and though he was a tenacious enemy of institutional racism, he also admonished blacks to disdain blame and seize opportunities to improve their own lives. In a 1982 column, he wrote about a coming light-heavyweight match between two local boxers, Dwight Braxton and Matthew Saad Muhammad, who had been locked up but had turned their lives around.

“I know a lot of you aren’t Dwight Braxtons or Matthew Saad Muhammads and you can’t find a job,” Mr. Stone wrote. “Hell, I’ll tell you how bad it is. Over 52 percent of all black teenagers are unemployed. ‘The world is a ghetto.’ But that’s no reason to rob a store or burglarize somebody’s home. You young brothers never think about how you would like it if another brother raped YOUR sister or burglarized YOUR home or snatched YOUR momma’s pocketbook. Black people are in terrible trouble as a race because there are not more Braxtons and Muhammads who go straight.”

“Chuck Stone was a product of his own design,” Elmer Smith, a member of The Daily News editorial board, wrote after Mr. Stone’s death, adding: “He didn’t study journalism. Objectivity was a polite convention that he didn’t have time for. He was a cause crusader because that’s what his people needed.”

Mr. Smith continued: “He was proudly and self-consciously black, which gave those of us who followed the confidence to be what we were and to cultivate our own distinctive voices.”