She ‘preserved Charlotte’s African American story.’ Mary Harper dies at age 84.
Mary Harper knew all too well what 1970s urban renewal meant for Charlotte’s Black community and its history and culture.
“If you translate ‘urban renewal,’ that meant ‘Black removal,’” Harper said in an interview posted on YouTube by the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture. The former Charlotte-Mecklenburg School teacher and college professor co-founded the center.
“And if you look at historical preservation, you begin to ask whose history is being preserved when so much was being torn down,” Harper said in the interview with Gantt Center co-founder Bertha Maxwell-Roddey.
Harper, whom the center credits with preserving “Charlotte’s African American story,” died Thursday night, in Charlotte, center officials announced Friday. She was 84. Funeral arrangements have not been announced.
Preserving Charlotte’s Black heritage
In the YouTube interview, Harper explained how the idea of an “Afro-American center” in Charlotte sprung during urban renewal, a center to “capture, preserve and promote” Black history and culture, she said.
“This center is set up to represent the diversity that is within Charlotte,” Harper explained, “... because it takes all of us to make Charlotte and America what it can be.
“America has not yet reached its promise,” she said. “Charlotte has not yet become what it can be.”
It takes all of us to achieve that, she said.
CMS years
Harper was born in Mount Pleasant, N.C., according to her obituary.
She obtained her undergraduate degree in English from Livingstone College in Salisbury and completed graduate work in English at UNC-Greensboro and Union Graduate School in Cincinnati, Ohio.
She taught in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools from 1961 to 1967, counting former U.S. congressman Mel Watt among her many high school English students.
Harper was later an assistant professor of English at UNC Charlotte pursuing her doctoral degree, when she felt the need to preserve Charlotte’s Black heritage.
Establishing the center
In 1974, she joined with mentor Bertha Maxwell, now Maxwell-Roddey, to create the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Afro-American Cultural & Service Center. Maxwell directed UNC Charlotte’s Black Studies Center at the time.
The center they formed eventually became the Harvey B. Gantt Center, named for the former Charlotte mayor.
“The Board of Directors and staff of the Harvey B. Gantt Center are forever indebted to Dr. Harper for her vision, her commitment and her determination to preserve Charlotte’s African-American story and to create a legacy for future generations,” David Taylor, Gantt Center president and CEO, said in a statement.
“We are indeed grateful to her and her family for their support over the past 46 years and we extend our deepest condolences to those she left behind.”
Many accolades
Among her many honors over the decades:
Harper received North Carolina’s top award, the Order of the Long Leaf Pine in 2014, and she is the co-namesake of the Gantt Center’s Harper-Roddey Society, the organization’s major donor society.
In 2013, the arts and science department at UNC Charlotte established the Harper-Thomas Endowment to honor her and fellow professor Herman Thomas. The endowment helps first-generation students to study abroad.
In 2018, the Gantt Center named its grand lobby in honor of Harper and Maxwell-Roddey.
The Gantt Center said in a tweet Friday, “Dr. Mary T. Harper was truly dedicated to the betterment of Black people in Charlotte. Her contributions to the Gantt are embedded in this organization’s legacy and her commitment to the community will never be forgotten.
“Rest in Power, Dr. Harper. #restinpower #activist.”
This story was originally published October 3, 2020 at 1:54 PM.