William Anthony Brown was born in Charleston, W.Va., on April 11, 1933, the youngest of five children of Royal and Katherine Brown. His father left before he was born, he told The Times in 1995, and from the age of 2 months, he was raised by Elizabeth Sanford and her daughter, Mabel Holmes, two women who weren’t relatives but were concerned about his welfare. (He referred to them as “angels” in the dedication to his 1995 book, “Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown.”) By the time he was 12, they had died and he was once again living with his mother.
A complete list of Mr. Brown’s survivors was not immediately available.
In school, he excelled in English and drama, and struggled to overcome his shyness by reading the works of Shakespeare on a local radio broadcast. He enlisted in the Army in 1953 and then studied at Wayne State University in Detroit, receiving a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1959 and later a master’s degree in psychiatric social work.
In June 1963, Mr. Brown helped organize a march in Detroit led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that some regarded as a dress rehearsal for the March on Washington two months later. The same year, he began working for The Detroit Courier, a predominantly Black newspaper, eventually serving as its drama critic and city editor.
In 1968, he moved to Detroit’s public television station, where he worked as a programmer and produced the station’s first show for African Americans, “Colored People’s Time.” When William Greaves, a host and executive producer of “Black Journal,” left in 1970 to make films, Mr. Brown was brought in to replace him. At the time, there were only a few nationally broadcast shows aimed at Black audiences.
When the show was renamed “Tony Brown’s Journal” in 1977, Mr. Brown made a deal with PepsiCo to sponsor it, and it was syndicated on commercial television for some 19 years, at one point appearing on 80 stations.
Mr. Brown served as the first dean of the Howard University School of Communications from 1971 to 1974, until holding both jobs proved onerous. For a while, he also wrote a weekly column syndicated in 130 newspapers and hosted a call-in radio show four times a week on WLIB-AM.
