httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fHuBPWN4VU
Photo Bill Nunn, a versatile actor best known for playing the role of Radio Raheem, the boombox-toting neighborhood philosopher killed by police officers in Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing,” died on Saturday in Pittsburgh.
The next year brought the critically acclaimed “Do the Right Thing,” in which he played the iconic Radio Raheem, who carries a boombox blaring Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” through the streets of the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn on the hottest day of summer.
Radio Raheem sits at the moral heart of the film, delivering a soliloquy directly to the camera on the ceaseless contest between love and hate, symbolized by the four-finger rings he wears on each hand.
His father was Bill Nunn, a scout for the Pittsburgh Steelers who helped build a football powerhouse in the 1970s by recruiting from the often-overlooked football programs at historically black colleges and universities.
Mr. Lee memorialized Mr. Nunn in a series of social media posts on Saturday, sharing the text of his “Do the Right Thing” soliloquy as well as pictures of him as Radio Raheem.
A version of this article appears in print on September 25, 2016, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill Nunn, ‘Do the Right Thing’ Star, Dies at 63.