This July 6, 1967 file photo shows the musical group, The Monkees, from left, Peter Tork, Mike Nesmith, David Jones, and Micky Dolenz at a news conference at the Warwick Hotel in New York.

Ray Howard/AP

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Ray Howard/AP

NEW YORK — Bobby Hart, a key part of the Monkees’ multimedia empire who teamed with Tommy Boyce on such hits as “Last Train to Clarksville” and “I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone,” has died. He was 86.

Hart died at his home in Los Angeles, according to his friend and co-author, Glenn Ballantyne. He had been in poor health since breaking his hip last year.

Boyce and Hart were a prolific and successful team in the mid-1960s, especially for the Monkees, the made-for-television group promoted by Don Kirshner. They wrote the Monkees’ theme song, with its opening shot, “Here we come, walkin’ down the street,” and enduring chant, “Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees,” and their first No. 1 hit, “Last Train to Clarksville.” The Monkees’ eponymous, million-selling debut album included six songs from Boyce and Hart, who also served as producers and used their own backing musicians, the Candy Store Prophets, as session players.

“I always credit them not only with writing many of our biggest hits, but, as producers, being instrumental in creating the unique Monkee sound we all know and love,” the Monkees’ Micky Dolenz wrote in a foreword to Hart’s memoir, Psychedelic Bubblegum, published in 2015.

As Boyce and Hart grew in fame and the Monkees took more control of their work, they pursued their own careers, releasing the albums Test Patterns and I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonite and appearing on such sitcoms as I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched. They also were politically active. They campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy when he ran for president in 1968 and wrote the brassy “L.U.V. (Let Us Vote)” in support of the 26th Amendment, which in 1971 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Their other songs included the Monkees’ melancholy “I Wanna Be Free” and the theme to the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives.

They were covered by everyone from Dean Martin (“Little Lovely One”) to the Sex Pistols (“I’m Not Your Steppin’ Stone”).

In the 1970s and ’80s, Hart managed several hits with other collaborators and even contributed material to another TV act, the Partridge Family. He worked with Austin Roberts on “Over You,” an Oscar-nominated ballad performed by Betty Buckley in “Tender Mercies,” and with Dick Eastman on “My Secret (Didja Gitit Yet?)” for New Edition. He and Bryce toured with Dolenz and fellow Monkee Davy Jones in the ’70s, put out the album Dolenz, Jones, Boyce & Hart and received renewed attention when the Monkees enjoyed a comeback in the 1980s.

Boyce, who died in 1994, and Hart were the subjects of a 2014 documentary The Guys Who Wrote ‘Em. Hart was married twice, most recently to singer Mary Ann Hart, and had two children from his first marriage.

He was a minister’s son, born Robert Luke Harshman in Phoenix, Arizona. In his memoir, he remembered himself as a shy kid with a “strong desire to distinguish” himself, as he wrote in Psychedelic Bubblegum. Music was the answer. By high school, he had learned piano, guitar and the Hammond B-3 organ. He also started his own amateur radio station, eventually adding a console, turntables and microphones. After graduating from high school and serving in the Army reserves, he settled in Los Angeles in the late 1950s, hoping first to become a disc jockey, but soon working as a songwriter and session musician. His name shortened to Bobby Hart, he toured as a member of Teddy Randazzo and the Dazzlers, and with Randazzo and Bobby Weinstein wrote “Hurt So Bad,” a hit for Little Anthony and the Imperials later covered by Linda Ronstadt.

He also befriended Boyce, a singer and songwriter from Charlottesville, Virginia, with a “very unusual personality, spontaneous and extroverted, yet very cool at the same time.” Boyce and Hart helped write the top 10 hit “Come a Little Bit Closer” for Jay and the Americans and were a strong enough combination that Kirshner recruited them for his Screen Gems songwriting factory: They were assigned to the Monkees. Asked to come up with songs for a quartet openly modeled on the Beatles, they devised a twangy guitar line similar to the one for “Paperback Writer” and wrote “Last Train to Clarksville,” a chart topper in 1966. When Kirshner suggested a song with a girl’s name in the title, they turned out “Valleri” and reached the top 5.

For the show’s theme song, a stroll outside was enough.

“Boyce began strumming his guitar and I joined in by snapping my fingers & making noises with my mouth that simulated an open & closed hi-hat cymbal,” Hart wrote in his memoir. “We had created the perfect recipe for inspiration and started singing about just what we were doing: ‘Walkin’ down the street.'”

Earl Richardson was the president of Morgan State University between 1984 and 2010.

Morgan State University

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Morgan State University

Earl Richardson was a Black college president — “armed with history,” as a colleague described him — when he led a 15-year-long lawsuit that ended in a historic settlement for four Black schools in Maryland and put a spotlight on funding disparities for all of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Richardson’s death, at 81, was announced on Saturday by Morgan State University, located in Baltimore, where he served as president when he helped organize the lawsuit that began in 2006. It was settled in 2021 when the state of Maryland agreed to give $577 million in supplemental funding over 10 years to four HBCUs.

Richardson led Morgan State from 1984 to 2010 and he had long chafed at stretching the little funding he got from the state. In the lawsuit, plaintiffs argued that Maryland had historically underfunded its Black colleges and had put them at a disadvantage by starting and boosting similar programs at nearby majority-white schools.

David Burton, one of the plaintiffs, told NPR that the case was compared to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark lawsuit that brought up similar issues of disparities in educational opportunities for Black students, but the Maryland case raised the issues for students in higher education.

In 1990, when Richardson was a new school president, students took over the administration building for six days to protest the school’s dilapidated classrooms and dorms, with roofs that leaked and science labs stocked with outdated equipment.

Edwin Johnson was one of those student protesters. “We originally were protesting against Morgan’s administration,” including Richardson, he said. “But then after we dig and do a little research, we find out it’s not our administration, but it’s the governor down in Annapolis that isn’t equipping the administration with what they need to appropriately run the school.”

The protest ended when the students marched 34 miles to Annapolis to demand a meeting with the governor.

Richardson, who spoke of taking part in civil rights demonstrations when he was in school, had subtly guided the students to the correct target, said Johnson, who is now the university’s historian and special assistant to the provost.

That protest helped pave the way to the future, historic lawsuit.

Because Richardson was the university’s president, and an employee of the state, he couldn’t sue the state. So, a coalition of students and former students was created, the Coalition for Equity and Excellence in Maryland Higher Education Inc., to serve as the plaintiff.

Still, Richardson was the visionary behind the lawsuit, said Burton, a Morgan State alumnus and now a strategic planner for businesses. “He was armed with history,” Burton said.

“Dr. Richardson knew where the skeletons were,” Burton added. He was “a force that the state could not reckon with because of his institutional knowledge.”

At one point, during the trial, state attorneys objected to Richardson’s presence in the courtroom and asked the judge to make him leave, even though he had a right to be there as an expert witness, said Jon Greenbaum, then the chief counsel of the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who helped argue the lawsuit.

Richardson stayed in the courtroom and “because this was really a desegregation case,” said Greenbaum, he provided historical detail that became critical to the arguments made by the lawyers representing the plaintiffs.

The funding that resulted, and Richardson’s leadership, jump-started what is now called on campus “Morgan’s Renaissance.” Or sometimes, said Johnson: “Richardson’s Renaissance” — because during Richardson’s presidency, enrollment doubled, the campus expanded with new buildings and new schools were added, including a school of architecture and a school of social work.

Richardson’s work put a spotlight, too, on the funding disparities faced by HBCUs across the country. They are more likely than other schools to rely upon federal, state and local funding — money that has faced budget cuts in recent years. Compared to other universities and colleges, HBCUs get a higher percentage of their revenue from tuition and less from private gifts and grants, according to one study.

In testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives in 2008, Richardson emphasized the mission of HBCUs when he told lawmakers that Black schools like his educated the most talented Black students but also sought to attract students who didn’t consider, or thought they couldn’t afford, to go to college. “We can make them the scientists and the engineers and the teachers and the professors — all of those things,” he said. But only if “we can have our institutions develop to a level of comparability and parity so that we are as competitive as other institutions.”