Lorenzo Wilson Milam, who devoted much of his life to building noncommercial radio stations with eclectic fusions of music, talk and public affairs, died on July 19 at his home in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. He was 86.

Charles Reinsch, a former manager of KRAB-FM in Seattle, Mr. Milam’s first station, announced the death. Mr. Milam moved full time to Mexico from San Diego after having several strokes in 2017.

He also struggled with the effects of polio, which he had contracted as a teenager, and which led him to use crutches and leg braces for much of his life and a wheelchair later on.

Mr. Milam loathed commercial radio stations, which he saw as purveyors of mindless junk. With KRAB and about a dozen other stations that he helped start in the 1960s and ’70s, he created a freewheeling, esoteric vision of commercial-free community radio as the voice of the people it served.

He wanted his stations to have inexperienced contributors, both on and off the air. He encouraged locals to help him program the stations and contribute a few dollars to keep these shoestring operations open.

“What’s wrong with commercial radio?” Mr. Milam said in a 1967 interview on “Mike Wallace at Large,” a CBS News radio program. “They play material that will be accepted by the masses. I say, ‘To hell with the masses.’” He added, “We play things that aren’t commonly accepted because no one else will put it on the air.”

KRAB’s on-air menu featured ethnic and classical music, readings (poetry, newspaper articles, children’s books, histories and scientific journals), commentary (some of it rantings by radicals on both the left and right), panel discussions, radio plays, interviews and programming produced by local groups, among them a fringe White Citizens’ Council.

Mr. Milam did not want a poem or piece of music diminished by the sound of an announcer breaking in at the end. To let listeners absorb the intensity of what they had just heard, he sometimes let as many as 10 minutes of silence pass before another program began.

The silences — which on a commercial station would have been filled at least partly by ads — were an element of Mr. Milam’s noncommercial policy.

“Broadcast time is too valuable to be sold,” he said on the Wallace program. “I think it should be given away — and I think it should be given away with a rose.”

Mr. Milam was not the architect of noncommercial radio. The first such station was said to be KPFA-FM in Berkeley, Calif., founded in 1949 by Lewis Hill, who also established the Pacifica Foundation, its parent organization. Mr. Milam volunteered at KPFA in the late 1950s while he was taking graduate courses at the University of California, Berkeley.

“If Lew Hill fathered the movement, Lorenzo Milam reared it,” Jesse Walker wrote in “Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America” (2001).

Mr. Milam left KRAB in the late 1960s and helped start commercial-free stations in St. Louis, San Francisco, Dallas, Portland, Ore., Los Gatos, Calif., and elsewhere. KRAB went off the air in 1984.

“He was so excited about radio and truly believed in it,” Mr. Reinsch, who is also KRAB’s archivist, said in an interview. “He had this fantasy that he would change the world with it.”

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Lorenzo Wilson Milam was born on Aug. 2, 1933, in Jacksonville, Fla. His father, Robert, was a lawyer and real estate investor. His mother, Meriel, was a homemaker.

Mr. Milam was stricken with polio in 1952, after his first year at Yale. His sister, who was also named Meriel, also contracted the disease and died a few months later, leaving him with memories that he excavated in his book “The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues” (1984).

“The iron maiden continues to pump dead lungs for over an hour before the night nurse discovers the drowned creature, gray froth on blue lips,” he wrote. “My sister, who never did anyone any harm, who only wished joy for those around her, now lies ice and bone, the good spirit fled from her.”

Mr. Milam learned to use a wheelchair at a Jacksonville hospital. He was also treated at a rehabilitation facility in Warm Springs, Ga., founded by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

He studied English literature at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, where he struggled to navigate the campus on crutches. He graduated in 1957 and worked at a Philadelphia television before moving to Berkeley. In 1959 he decided he wanted to return east to start a community station in Washington. His goal for it was lofty: He wanted it to help avoid World War III.

Mr. Milam envisioned influencing government policymakers and generals with vigorous foreign policy debates and a documentary program on the hazards of nuclear radiation.

“After a few months of this, they would be saying to themselves, ‘We must be idiots to think that war is the answer to our problems,’” he was quoted as saying in “Rebels on the Air.”

But he was unable to get a license from the Federal Communications Commission after informing the agency that the station would be Pacifica-like.

“I filed the application, and it took me over a year of sad waiting to find out that Pacifica was considered to be a front for the Communist Party,” he told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2014.

Mr. Milam turned his attention to Seattle and received a license for KRAB in 1962. His successes there and elsewhere led him to write the whimsically titled “Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community” (1975).

But the failure in 1977 of a Dallas station that he had started with partners, KCHU-FM, after operating for just two years, led him to back away from community radio.

Over the next 40 years, he focused on writing and editing. He published The Fessenden Review, a literary journal, and RALPH: The Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy and the Humanities, an online book review magazine.

He described his career in “The Radio Papers: From KRAB to KCHU” (1986) and wrote passionately about disabilities in “The Cripple Liberation Front” and “Cripzen: A Manual for Survival” (1993).

In later years, his polio returned.

“All disabled people know fear,” Mr. Milam told New Mobility, a magazine for wheelchair users, in 2000. “We know that we’re very vulnerable. We know we’re going to get more and more disabled and we’re going to get more and more dependent and we’re probably going to get more and more scared.”

“How do we handle being an old, scared geezer?” he asked.

He is survived by a daughter, Kevin; a grandchild; a sister, Patricia; and a brother, Robert. His marriage to Clare Marx ended in divorce.

KRAB came to define Mr. Milam’s sense of mission. Having been thwarted in his first efforts to start a station, he turned KRAB into a centerpiece of listener-supported radio.

“It took me from being a loser poet and failed Washington, D.C., broadcaster to being something of value for my society and my culture,” he wrote in “The Radio Papers.” “It took me from vague hopes of good programming in 1959 to a purveyor of what is and can be the best in men’s souls.”

Diana E.H. Russell, a leading feminist activist and scholar who popularized the term “femicide” to refer to the misogynist killing of women, and to distinguish these killings from other forms of homicide, died on July 28 at a medical facility in Oakland, Calif. She was 81.

The cause was respiratory failure, said Esther D. Rothblum, a feminist scholar and friend.

Dr. Russell studied and explored all manner of violence against women, including rape, incest, child abuse, battering, pornography and sexual harassment, and she was among the first to illuminate the connections between and among these acts.

As a daughter of white privilege growing up in South Africa, her rebellious instincts found an outlet in the anti-apartheid movement. Later, as a graduate student in the United States in the 1960s, she gravitated to the feminist movement, becoming one of the earliest researchers to focus on sexual violence against women.

Gloria Steinem said in an email that Dr. Russell had “a giant influence” on the women’s movement worldwide, and that her writings had particular resonance now, “when we see the intertwining of racism and sexism that she wrote about so well and organized against.”

In a 1995 essay, “Politicizing Sexual Violence: A Voice in the Wilderness,” Dr. Russell described the seeds of her work.

“My own experiences of sexual abuse as a child and an adolescent have undoubtedly been vital motivators for my enduring commitment to the study of sexual violence against women,” she wrote.

“My research and activism,” she added, “exemplify how personal trauma can inform and inspire creative work.”

She explored these topics in more than a dozen books over four decades. If there was a through-line in them, it was her rejection of the common practice of victim blaming.

In “The Politics of Rape” (1975), she argued that rape is an act of conformity to ideals of masculinity. Rolling Stone magazine called the book “probably the best introduction to rape now in print.”

In 1977, Dr. Russell surveyed 930 women in depth in San Francisco and found that more than 40 percent had been the victims of rape or incest — a much higher rate than other studies suggested. Those interviews led to a series of books: “Rape in Marriage” (1982); “Sexual Exploitation: Rape, Child Sexual Abuse and Workplace Harassment” (1984); and “The Secret Trauma: Incest in the Lives of Girls and Women” (1986).

Dr. Russell first heard the word “femicide” in 1974, when a friend told her that someone was writing a book with that title.

“I immediately became very excited by this new word, seeing it as a substitute for the gender-neutral word ‘homicide,’” she said in a 2011 speech.

She later found out that Carol Orlock was the author who had intended to write the “Femicide” book but had not done so. Dr. Russell said that Ms. Orlock was later delighted to hear that Dr. Russell was popularizing the term.

Dr. Russell changed her definition of “femicide” over the years, but in the end she described it as “the killing of females by males because they are female.” This covered a range of acts, including killing a wife or girlfriend for having an affair or being rebellious, setting a wife on fire for having too small a dowry, death as a result of genital mutilation, and the murder of sex slaves and prostitutes.

Her definition also covered indirect forms of killing, such as when women are barred from using contraception or obtaining an abortion, often leading them to seek unsafe abortions that can be botched and result in death. Similarly, “femicide” covered women who died of AIDS after infected men had unprotected sex with them.

Dr. Russell first used the term publicly when addressing the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, a global event held in Brussels in 1976 and attended by 2,000 women from 40 countries.

Dr. Russell had conceived of the tribunal and helped organize it. Among the speakers was Simone de Beauvoir, who hailed the gathering as “the beginning of the radical decolonization of women.”

Diana Elizabeth Hamilton Russell was born on Nov. 6, 1938, in Cape Town. Her father, James Hamilton Russell, was a member of the South African Parliament. He bought the South African branch of the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, and was its managing director before and during his political career.

Dr. Russell’s mother, Kathleen Mary (Gibson) Russell, who was British, had traveled to South Africa to teach education and drama; when she married Mr. Russell, she became a homemaker and had six children but still found time to join the anti-apartheid Black Sash movement. (She was a niece of Violet Gibson, who had attempted to assassinate Mussolini in 1926.)

Diana was the fourth child, born a half-hour before her twin brother, David. She attended an elite Anglican boarding school for girls, where the motto was “Manners maketh man.”

“I was raised to be a useless appendage to some rich white man and to carry on the exploitive tradition of my family,” Dr. Russell wrote in the 1995 essay.

Her mother wanted her to take classes in cooking and sewing, but Diana signed up instead for academic classes at the University of Cape Town. She graduated in 1958 at 19 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. She then left for England and studied social science and administration at the London School of Economics, where she was named the best student in the class of 1961.

Back in South Africa, she joined the Liberal Party, which had been founded by Alan Paton, the author of “Cry the Beloved Country” (1948).

Her arrest during a peaceful protest soon led to “the most momentous decision I’d ever before made,” as she wrote on her website: She joined an underground revolutionary organization called the African Resistance Movement, which sabotaged government property as a form of protest. She said she had concluded that “aboveground, nonviolent strategies would be futile against the brutal, white Afrikaner police state.”

But before long she left for Harvard, where she earned a master’s degree in 1967 and a doctorate in 1970, both in social psychology. She then became a research associate at Princeton, where she wrote her dissertation on revolutionary activity. She said that the “extreme misogyny at Princeton started me on my feminist path.”

Dr. Russell married Paul Ekman, an American psychologist known for his work on facial expressions, in 1968. He was teaching in San Francisco, and she took a teaching position at Mills College, a private women’s school in Oakland, to be near him. They divorced after three years.

“Divorce heralded the beginning of my creative life as an active feminist and researcher,” she wrote.

Dr. Russell stayed at Mills for 22 years. As a professor of sociology, she taught courses on women and sexism and helped develop a major in women’s studies.

As she delved into violence against women, she became a fierce opponent of pornography, a divisive issue among feminists in the 1980s. Some felt it encouraged rape and abuse; other, “sex-positive” feminists saw it as a free-speech issue and argued that pornography gave women sexual agency.

In her book “Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm” (1994), Dr. Russell argued that pornography led to “pro-rape attitudes and behavior.” She became a founding member of Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media.

She often took to the streets for her causes, staging sit-ins in government offices, spray-painting feminist slogans on businesses she considered misogynist and destroying magazines in porn shops. For a time she was the only picketer outside a restaurant in Berkeley, Calif., owned by a man who trafficked in underage girls.

Dr. Russell lived in a collective in Berkeley with several other women and a succession of rescue dogs. She is survived by her sister, Jill Hall, and a brother, Robin Hamilton Russell. Her twin brother, David, who became an Anglican bishop and a champion of the poor in South Africa, died in 2014.

In her later writings, Dr. Russell said that her “radical feminism” had cost her job offers, grants and fellowships. Still, she said, she did not regret her failure to “serve the patriarchy” because her work had helped many women lift the veil of secrecy surrounding traumatic experiences.

A little more than two months ago, in the aftermath of Memorial Day weekend, New Yorkers of a certain caste indulged rounds of condescension directed at a set of anonymous partygoers in the Ozarks. The catalyst was the viral image of a pool party where people were grouped a shot glass width apart, none of them wearing masks.

Wasn’t this the problem, ultimately? The rubes and the deniers, with so little regard for science, who were unwilling to sacrifice, for the collective good, the pleasures of a Miller Lite consumed at a floating cocktail table.

Now, deep into summer, we find ourselves witnessing the reckless defiance of the ultra-privileged — the bankers and technocrats, their charges, clients and affiliates — the ones whose derisive snickering at the habits of the Tesla-free can typically be heard all the way to Branson, Mo. A pandemic that has taken tens of thousands of American lives will not impede their good time; it will not upset the rituals of the season. The boogying continues as if it were Q3 2019.

And in the moneyed quarters of the country, it really is. The stock market remains inexplicably strong. And because the rich, cosseted by significant safeguards and workarounds, rarely feel the full force of catastrophe, the solidarity that might come in a shared crisis is replaced instead by stunning shows of individual invincibility and obliviousness.

The elite and sophisticated are no less likely to behave as deplorably as the rebel masses; they simply have to deal with fewer of the consequences. The virus has proved ruthlessly efficient in decimating the marginalized in far greater numbers than the affluent. It has simply reiterated the extent to which well-being is really just something else that can be bought.

Last month, Alison Friedman Brod, a Manhattan publicist who once delightedly posed under a sign that read “I do not cook. I do not clean. I do not fly commercial,” posted a picture of herself to Facebook with two doctors, on a house call, against the backdrop of an expansive Hamptons lawn.

“Part of the stress of this virus is living with uncertainty,’’ she wrote. “I have avoided many sleepless nights by constant testing.”

Perhaps some of those who attended a fund-raiser on the East End of Long Island two weeks ago, one that drew the ire of the New York’s health commissioner, were also getting their nasal passages swabbed with regularity. The charity event, attended by thousands of guests, was supposed to be a socially distant “drive-in concert” that featured, among other performances, the Goldman Sachs chief executive David Solomon channeling his inner Deadmau5. Mr. Solomon, who received a 20 percent raise in March that brought him to $27.5 million a year, calls himself “DJ D-Sol.” The evening’s organizers claimed that the rules were followed, but it hardly appeared that way to the surveillance armies of social media.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo was among those to express fury. But is he really the one to inspire fear and corrective behavior among the wealthy? Recently, in response to the suggestion that a substantial tax on New York’s billionaires could close the state’s enormous budget deficits, the governor responded as if someone had proposed killing off the warblers of the Adirondacks.

“That means you would have no billionaires,” he cautioned, even though extinction of a group whose wealth grew by $77 billion in his state during the first three months of the pandemic seems unlikely.

When you are in the business of servicing the selfishly rich, you eventually find yourself catering to a spirit of lawlessness. Several days ago, Nello, a durable Italian restaurant on Madison Avenue where a bowl of middling capellini with red sauce costs $36, had its liquor license suspended. It was called out by state officials for allowing diners to eat inside, in violation of a citywide ban.

What of the children of the rich, in the absence of what parenting guides would call good modeling? Recently, a coronavirus spike in Greenwich, Conn., was traced to a series of parties populated by private school students. About half of the 41 cases that arose in the town the week of July 19 occurred among young people between the ages of 10 and 19 who had attended the same constellation of get-togethers.

It was hard to know how far the virus had spread there, however. As an aide to a local official told The Hartford Courant, the teenagers and their families were not cooperating with contact tracers. At least one student had been infected at a birthday party for a grown-up.

Remarking on the outbreak, Connecticut’s governor, Ned Lamont, said that he hoped the “power of shame’’ would change the way that people conducted themselves, a noble but doomed notion given how robustly the country produces immunities to it. Shame is not a sentiment especially endemic to 21st-century Greenwich, a place where quieter patrician values long ago gave way to the modern venalities — the uninterrupted gilt and the six-car garages. A guy in a Ted Nugent T-shirt raging at a 7-11 clerk who asks him to wear a mask is no different than the determined Fairfield County mom who will not risk the success of her daughter’s college application by revealing her misdeeds to disease detectives.

In many cases, the well-to-do want to manage a public health crisis on their own terms, choosing selectively from the safety measures at hand. Many teachers at private schools around New York are fearful of returning to school in the absence of adequate testing for those without the benefits of concierge medicine and in environments where, even under the best circumstances, children begin coughing in October and don’t stop until the end of March.

Parents everywhere, quite understandably, hope that school can begin in its conventional form. But certain parents paying large tuitions to elite institutions see it as a right to demand that classes happen live, despite the lack of convincing data on what a safe reopening of schools would look like. Education is simply another realm viewed through the lens of return on investment.

Several days ago, a small group of parents at Packer Collegiate, a private school in Brooklyn Heights, drafted a letter to administrators expressing outrage that the school year would begin remotely. They came from the worlds of finance, law, design, dentistry — which is to say that they did not make up a team of renowned epidemiologists. And yet they wrote with the apparent conviction that their own knowledge was beyond dispute, helpfully footnoting their missive with links to articles in The Atlantic and other publications, as if the educators enacting the plan had somehow failed to pay attention to the virus coverage.

Implicit in these entitled outbursts is the fear that, somehow, children of nearly unfathomable advantage will fall behind. But behind whom? And how many of these parents, you have to wonder, quietly spent the summer sequestered at home?

On Aug. 10, 1920, two African-American musicians, Mamie Smith and Perry Bradford, went into a New York studio and changed the course of music history. Ms. Smith, then a modestly successful singer from Cincinnati who had made only one other record, a sultry ballad that fizzled in the marketplace, recorded a new song by Mr. Bradford called “Crazy Blues.” A boisterous cry of outrage by a woman driven mad by mistreatment, the song spoke with urgency and fire to Black listeners across the country who had been ravaged by the abuses of race-hate groups, the police and military forces in the preceding year — the notorious “Red Summer” of 1919.

“Crazy Blues” became a hit record of unmatched proportions and profound impact. Within a month of its release, it sold some 75,000 copies and would be reported to sell more than two million over time. It established the blues as a popular art and prepared the way for a century of Black expression in the fiery core of American music.

As a record, something made for private listening in the home, “Crazy Blues” was able to say things rarely heard in public performances. Seemingly a song about a woman whose man has left her, it reveals itself, on close listening, to be a song about a woman moved to kill her abusive partner. As a work of blues, it used the language of domestic strife to tell a story of violence and subjugation that Black Americans also knew outside the home, in a world of white oppression. The blues worked on multiple levels simultaneously and partly in code, with “my man” or “the man” translatable as “the white man” or “white people.”

Ms. Smith, a skilled contralto with a keen sense of drama, brought clarity and panache to words that would strike today’s listeners as conventional only because they have been replicated and emulated in countless variations over the past century: “I can’t sleep at night/ I can’t eat a bite/ ’Cause the man I love/ he don’t treat me right.”

Out of her mind with despair, the singer turns to violence against her oppressor for relief in the chorus that gives the song its title: “Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can/ But what you’re gonna need is an undertaker man/ I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news/ Now I’ve got the crazy blues.”

That a woman was singing made the song an acutely potent message of protest against the forces of authority, be they male or white, domestic or sociopolitical.

With “Crazy Blues,” Mamie Smith opened the door to a surge of powerfully voiced female singers who defied the conventions of singerly gentility to make the blues a popular phenomenon in the 1920s. Indeed, the blues became a full-blown craze, with listeners of every color able to buy and listen at home to music marketed as “race records.” The form was initially associated almost exclusively with women such as Ms. Smith, Ma Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. They and many more women made hundreds of records that sold millions of copies over more than a decade — well before the great bluesman Robert Johnson stepped into a recording studio for the first time, in November 1936.

There had been some blues recordings before “Crazy Blues,” nearly all instrumentals or records, often made by white musicians, of songs of various kinds with the word “Blues” in the title. A feeling of veracity as Black expression was part of the secret of “Crazy Blues.” But so was the song’s disturbing but powerful ending, in which Ms. Smith sings allegorically of the darkening circumstances: “There’s a change in the ocean/ change in the deep blue sea.” In the concluding verse, she speaks of changing the way she responds. She has decided to “go and get some hop,” she announces, and “get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop.”

It was an idea at once abhorrent and cathartic. Recorded in the wake of horrific violence against African-Americans, “Crazy Blues” was not only an outlet for exasperation in the face of “nothin’ but bad news.” It was also a rallying cry in Black musical language and a call for redress through reciprocal violence — one that broke daringly out of domestic allegory into a literal sphere where the police and the military claimed the only prerogative to shoot at will.

One hundred years later, the blues endures as the essence of American music, from rock ’n’ roll and three-chord country songs to hip-hop and contemporary R&B. If in a 2020 hit like Chris Brown and Young Thug’s “Go Crazy,” the title means to party, not to feel blue, we should remember that Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was also a dance tune: People were not only moved by it; they moved to it.

From its earliest days, the blues has always done many and sometimes contradictory things at the same time, as both an outlet for rage and a release from it. Hatred and violence have hardly disappeared from the American landscape, but neither has the blues.

David Hajdu (@davidhajdu) is the music critic for The Nation, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the author of the forthcoming “Adrianne Geffel: A Fiction.”

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