When Joan Campbell invited the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to speak at her all-white church in the Cleveland suburbs in 1965, she had no idea of the furor it would cause.
Bomb threats were made to her family’s spacious home in Shaker Heights, where Ms. Campbell was a full-time wife and mother. Some members of Heights Christian Church, where she worshiped, refused to let Dr. King cross its threshold.
“He finally did speak there, but he spoke outside, on the steps of the church, and there were at least 3,000 people there to hear him, and that would have never been true had it been inside the church,” Ms. Campbell recalled in an interview in 2016.
“Little did I know it was the beginning of who I am today,” she said.
Ms. Campbell, who became an ordained minister of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Dr. King’s denomination, went on to lead the National Council of Churches, the top ecumenical position in the country, representing 42 million Christians. She died on March 29 in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. She was 93.
The cause of her death, in an assisted living center, was complications of dementia, her daughter, Jane Campbell, a former mayor of Cleveland, said.
The Rev. Joan Brown Campbell did not become a minister until she was 49. Before that, she raised three children with her husband, a corporate lawyer, and their home was a nexus of activists in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.
She was a formidable leader of the ecumenical movement in the United States, which promotes unity among members of various Christian faiths. When she was elected general secretary of the National Council of Churches in 1990, the body represented 32 denominations, including mainline Protestants, like Methodists and Episcopalians; traditionally Black churches, such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church; and Orthodox faiths, like the Greek and Syrian churches.
Ms. Campbell, the first ordained woman to lead the council, presided for a decade. During that time she sought to counterbalance religious conservatives’ embrace of the Republican Party, which had begun in the 1980s.
“Our concern is that the radical right lays claim to the fact that they uniquely speak for people of faith in this country, in essence that ‘God is on our side,’” Ms. Campbell told The New York Times in 1994, when she and other mainline religious leaders formed a lobbying group to counter the Christian Coalition. “We feel we must come together as an interfaith group and say to this country there is an alternate religious voice.”
Ms. Campbell’s role as an ecumenical leader thrust her into high-profile political situations: a trip by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson to Serbia in 1999 to win the release of three captive American soldiers; a campaign to limit climate change through the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 treaty ratified by some 200 countries but not the U.S.; and a politically fraught custody battle over a 6-year-old Cuban refugee, Elián González.
After surviving a disaster at sea in which his mother drowned in 1999, Elián was brought to Miami, where the Cuban American community fought his father’s demand that the boy be returned to Cuba.
Ms. Campbell, who had been visiting Cuba for more than 30 years, was enlisted by the Cuban Council of Churches to help Elián’s father regain custody. She visited Cuba, and Elián’s grandmothers stayed in her Manhattan apartment.
Though Ms. Campbell suggested to the Clinton administration that she serve as an intermediary between the father and Elián’s Miami relatives, who also sought custody, the case mainly played out in the courts and in the news media.
Miami officials refused to cooperate with the federal authorities. On the order of Attorney General Janet Reno, immigration officers forcibly removed Elián from his relatives’ home, and he returned with his father to Cuba.
“It’s deep in the American court system that children belong with their families unless their families are abusive,” Ms. Campbell told The Times in early 2000, arguing that Elián would be better off with his father, even in an authoritarian country.
Joan Louise Brown was born on Nov. 13, 1931, in Youngstown, Ohio, one of two daughters of James D. Brown, a physician, and Jane (Bunn) Brown.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and speech from the University of Michigan in 1953. In Ann Arbor, she met a law student, Paul B. Campbell, and they married in 1952.
The couple raised their three children in a house that was the scene of gatherings for liberal politicians and causes, including one with Dr. Benjamin Spock to raise money to oppose the Vietnam War. Ms. Campbell worked to elect Carl Stokes as Cleveland’s first Black mayor in 1967.
But the time she devoted to activism strained her marriage, and the Campbells divorced in 1974.
Ms. Campbell threw herself into the ecumenical movement. She was ordained in 1980 by the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and her ordination was further recognized by the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the American Baptist Churches.
She told The Times in 1990 that she did not regret getting a late start on a career because of the years she had spent raising her children. “It taught me patience, perseverance and risk-taking,” she said.
Ms. Campbell was the only woman among 200 clergy in the procession that enthroned Desmond Tutu as the archbishop of the Anglican Church in Cape Town in 1986.
She was the first woman to serve as the executive director of the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches, and from there she was elected head of the National Council of Churches when she was 59.
Stepping down after a decade, Ms. Campbell was named director of religion at the Chautauqua Institution, the cultural and intellectual retreat in western New York, where she led worship services during the summers for 14 years. Her sermons were enlivened by a gift for storytelling, weaving together tales from her own eventful life with anecdotes about grandchildren and friends.
In 2017, when she was 86, she married the Rev. Albert Mitchell Pennybacker Jr., who had been the minister of her church in Shaker Heights and who had inspired her to become a civil rights activist. He died in 2022.
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by two sons, Paul B. Campbell Jr., who retired as head of the International Baccalaureate Organization, and Dr. James W. Campbell, a retired family practice doctor; eight grandchildren; four great-grandchildren; and a sister, Betty Stralnic.
At a memorial service in 1997 for the astronomer Carl Sagan, with whom Ms. Campbell had helped found the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, she recalled an exchange they had. “He would say to me, ‘You are so smart, why do you believe in God?’” she said. “And I’d say, ‘You are so smart, why don’t you believe in God?’”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com