Charles E. Silberman, a journalist whose books addressed vast, turbulent social subjects, including race, education, crime and the state of American Jewry, died Feb. 5 in Sarasota, Fla. He was 86 and had lived in Sarasota in recent years.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

A former writer and editor at Fortune magazine, Silberman was known in particular for three books that took on some of the most highly charged issues of the day: “Crisis in Black and White” (1964), “Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education” (1970) and “Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice” (1978).

In “Crisis in Black and White,” he explored the nation’s long history of racial oppression, and its dire effects on the economic, social and educational prospects of 20th-century blacks. The book spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Reviewing it, Time magazine wrote that Silberman “marches in no-nonsense fashion to a number of hard truths that are not meant to comfort or console.”

In “Crisis in the Classroom,” the product of a study underwritten by the Carnegie Foundation, Silberman turned his attention to the state of American public education, which he indicted as bleak, oppressive and generally in disarray.

“Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice” examined American crime and punishment through the lens of racism.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Roger Wilkins said, “In a field as beset by emotion, mythology and fear as crime is, honest reporting, earnest analysis and honorable speculation can surely serve the republic well, and that is what this book does — and more.”

Charles Eliot Silberman was born on Jan. 31, 1925, in Des Moines, Iowa, and grew up in New York City. After Navy service aboard a minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1946 and did graduate work in economics there.