Civil rights advocate and longtime Call and Post Newspaper Associate Publisher and Executive Editor Constance “Connie” Harper died Friday at a Dayton, Ohio, hospital where she was on life support after suffering a heart attack. She was 81.
Funeral arrangements are pending.
Harper was a major voice in Cleveland’s African American community since the early 1960s. That’s when she began writing for the paper and eventually became the editor under the late Call and Post publisher W.O. Walker. She also hosted a talk show on WJMO, a local radio station. The Call and Post is Ohio’s oldest and most prominent Black newspaper with distribution in Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.
She was a former elementary school teacher for the Cleveland Municipal School District and later worked in professional boxing as vice president for Don King Productions. She worked for the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections before rejoining the Call and Post in 1998 when King became publisher.
Harper, as editor, and King, as publisher, were the first of the more the 215 African American newspapers of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) to endorse then Illinois Sen. Barack Obama for president.
Harper was a staunch advocate of civil and human rights and was at one time an officer of the NNPA.
Harper was a member of the “Old Black Political Guard” and was among those who helped elect the late Carl B. Stokes as mayor of Cleveland in 1967, the first Black mayor of a major American city. She grew up on Cleveland’s east side near King and the Stokes brothers; Louis Stokes became the first Black congressman from Ohio, a post now held by Rep. Marcia L. Fudge (11th Congressional District).
The civil rights pioneer, who was a moderate republican with bi-partisan political views, published Call and Post articles consequential to the Black community, including those on police brutality, racial discrimination, education, Black empowerment, and the election of Obama as president in 2008, and his reelection in 2012. She received numerous awards and commendations and in 2010 accepted the Thomas Morgan III Award for AIDS/HIV awareness from the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the California-based Black AIDS Institute.
Harper was honored by the Cleveland chapter of 100 Black Men earlier this month and was scheduled to attend a Nov. 7 gala by the Cleveland Press Club to be inducted into the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame with four others, including former Cleveland Fox 8 News anchor Wilma Smith, and 19 Action News reporter Paul Orlousky,
Reared in Cleveland, Harper graduated from John Adams High School in Cleveland and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Central State University, where she was the editor of the student newspaper. She was the youngest of five female siblings, two of them deceased.
She was also an active member of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, and was a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc.
