Born. To James Meredith, 34, Negro civil rights activist and contender for the vacant congressional seat of Harlem's Adam Clayton Powell; and Mary Wig gins Meredith, 30: twin boys, their second and third children; in Manhattan.

Married. James D. Watson, 40, who shared a 1962 Nobel prize for medicine with two Britons for unraveling the structure of DNA, the heredity-determining molecule, recently disturbed his colleagues by publishing The Double Helix, a gossipy account of the team's feuds and finds; and Elizabeth Lewis, 19, a Radcliffe junior and Watson's secretary at Harvard; both for the first time; in La Jolla, Calif.

Died. Martin Luther King, 39, civil rights leader and Nobel laureate (see THE NATION).

Died. Lev Landau, 60, Nobel-prize-wmning Soviet theoretical physicist, whose tenacity to life after an auto accident in Moscow six years ago astonished the medical world; of unspecified causes related to the accident; in Moscow. At the time the fourth Russian to win a Nobel prize in physics (for his theories on :he behavior of matter at low temperatures), "Dau" also helped his country develop nuclear weapons and contributed to the Soviet space program. In 1962, his car plowed into a truck, leaving him with such severe injuries that he was in a coma for 57 days and clinically dead on four occasions. Eventually he recovered enough to say, "I can talk to friends, but I do not have the courage to resume other activities."

Died. Frank Freimann, 63, president since 1950 of Magnavox Co., who prodded the once small electronics firm out of components and into the consumer market; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Whether it was tubes and resistors or TV sets and stereo consoles, Freimann was a bug about bugs: either make it right or not at all. Nor did he join the postwar race to discount, sold only at a fixed price--and made it stick so successfully that sales last year topped the $400 million mark.

Died. Francisco de Assis Chateaubriand Bandeira de Mello, 75, Brazil's banty rooster of communications, whose interests were as lengthy as his name; of a heart attack; in Sao Paulo. Slick financing and a knack for marketing new ideas brought Chateaubriand an empire of newspapers, magazines, TV and radio stations that at the time of his death included 89 companies; he helped bring Dictator Getulio Vargas to power in 1930, later helped pull him down. The fire diminished in 1960 after he suffered a cerebral thrombosis flared again in 1962 when he scuttled Janio Quadros' political comeback.

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