By Monica Whitsitt
Staff Reporter
A memorial service for David Yellin, former professor at the University of Memphis, will be held at 1 p.m. June 15 in the main theater of the theater and communications department.
Yellin, a social activist and communicator since the 1940s, died May 24 of Parkinson’s disease.
Yellin founded the broadcast and film department here in the 1960s, and continued to teach until he retired in the early ‘80s.
“David really didn’t train people to be journalists or communication people,” said Dr. Richard Ranta, dean of the College of Communication and Fine Arts, and longtime friend of Yellin. “He educated them. He was going to be challenging your mind, pushing you to ask questions and probe and go beyond the obvious. He definitely wasn’t into covering traffic accidents.”
Yellin’s career was not limited to the classroom, however. Throughout his life, Yellin was committed to civil liberties and racial equality. He worked with Edward Murrow in the 1950s to expose McCarthyism, and he and his wife, the late Carol Yellin, documented the Memphis sanitation strike in 1968. That footage is part of the Mississippi Valley Collection, which is kept here at The University.
In addition to his social activism, Yellin was a stage manager on Broadway and wrote scripts for the early Superman radio program in 1946 and 1947. In the 1970s, Yellin produced Face to Face, a public affairs program on WMC-TV Channel 5.
Yellin used his knowledge in the field of media to cross political and social boundaries. According to Ranta, Yellin was very “forceful” in the face of people he considered to be bigots or not tolerant of social change.
Yellin is survived by his daughter, Emily, author and journalist, son, Doug, an Los Angeles film producer, and son, Tom, a producer for ABC news, and four grandchildren.
