Cyril D. Tyson, who led antipoverty programs from inside and outside government in New York City and Newark in the 1960s in a tense racial atmosphere punctuated by violence, died on Thursday at his home in North Salem, N.Y. He was 89.

His wife of 64 years, Sunchita, said he died after several strokes.

“Athlete, educator, civil rights activist, public servant, dad,” his son Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist, a television host and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in Manhattan, said on Twitter.

Cyril Tyson was a former college track star who had worked on the staffs of the New York City Commission on Intergroup Relations and its successor, the Commission on Human Rights, when, in 1963, he joined Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a new, government-financed antipoverty organization that became widely known as Haryou.

He played a major role in designing the group’s programs, which were aimed at improving the area’s public schools and its residents’ job skills and opportunities. It included after-school remedial study centers and on-the-job training projects.