‘Mel’ Stewart, 72; TV, Movie Actor, Acting Teacher and Jazz Saxophonist

Milton “Mel” Stewart, an actor whose work was familiar from television shows such as “All in the Family” and “Scarecrow and Mrs. King,” died of Alzheimer’s disease Feb. 24 at a nursing home in Pacifica, Calif. He was 72.

The longtime Bay Area resident also was an acting teacher whose students included Danny Glover, and was an accomplished saxophonist as well. He had a black belt in aikido and ran a martial arts school for inner-city youths in San Francisco.

Stewart started acting as a teenager with a neighborhood theater in Cleveland, where he was born. He later moved to New York, where he won roles in several Broadway productions, including Langston Hughes’ “Simply Heavenly.” He played saxophone with such jazz legends as John Coltrane and Charlie Parker.

He moved to Northern California in the 1960s and joined the improvisation group called the Committee, which brought him to Hollywood’s attention. Television and film brought a steady stream of roles in the 1970s and ‘80s.

He was a semi-regular from 1971 to 1973 on “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking CBS series that starred Carroll O’Connor as the bombastic, blue-collar Archie Bunker. Stewart portrayed the outspoken Henry Jefferson, a member of the black family next door to the Bunkers who was, as TV historians Tim Brooks and

Earle Marsh once wrote, “as opinionated from the black point of view as Archie was from the white.”

Often cast as an authority figure because of his stern countenance, Stewart also appeared in such movies as “Steelyard Blues” in 1973 and “Newman’s Law” in 1974. He retired from acting after making “Made in America” with Whoopi Goldberg in 1993, telling his wife, Annie Dong-Stewart, that there were “too many black bald actors in Hollywood.”

When not performing, Stewart taught acting in workshops at San Francisco State University and through a theater group he founded called BANTU (Black Actors Now Through Unity). He also taught and directed plays at the Center for African and African American Art and Culture in San Francisco and the Black Repertory Group Theatre in Berkeley.

Although acting paid the bills, Stewart’s “first true love” was music, Dong-Stewart said. A self-taught musician, he played the flute and the piano in addition to the tenor sax, and frequently performed in Bay Area clubs.

In addition to his wife of 25 years, he leaves a daughter, Alia Dong-Stewart, also of Pacifica; and a brother, Morris, of Cleveland.