Appreciation: Steve Crump, WBTV journalist, filmmaker

DANIEL COSTON | THE CHARLOTTE POST

WBTV reporter Steve Crump, with Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles (left) and wife Cathy in 2021. Mr. Crump, who spent nearly 40 years at the television station, died Thursday at age 65.

Steve Crump, one of the most recognizable TV journalists in the Carolinas, died Thursday at age 65.

Mr. Crump, who died from complications of colon cancer, worked as a reporter at WBTV for nearly 40 years. He was also an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who covered stories from hurricanes to civil rights pioneers and the transatlantic slave trade.  

“Maybe I do educate,” Mr. Crump told The Post in 2019, “but the overarching theme is cheering for the underdog. I see myself as somebody who has delivered information that empowered a community. You end up sinking your teeth in something.”

A Louisville, Kentucky, native and horse racing fan, Mr. Crump arrived at WBTV in 1984. Subsequently, he took a job with a Detroit station, but was lured back to Charlotte by long-time broadcast executive Jim Babb.

“I think his work has been the finest of anybody in journalism in Charlotte during the last 35 or 40 years,” Babb told The Post in 2019. … “Steve exhibited a lot of talent, drive, energy and enthusiasm. We thought he would not only be good on the air, but he’d be good in the newsroom as far as overall morale.”

In July, shortly after Mr. Crump hosted a “Five Year Cancer Survivors Brunch” for friends and family, he shared a photo on social media of himself in a hospital bed with tubes in his chest with a caption that read he was “back in the pokey” for treatment.

The Post’s 2019 Educator of the Year and a reporter at WBTV since 1981, Mr. Crump produced more than 30 documentaries for WTVI with subjects as varied as Black jockeys’ role in the growth of thoroughbred horse racing, the life and times of Muhammad Ali, desegregation of Charlotte’s Harding High School in 1957 and the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre in which three black students were killed in a clash with law enforcement at a bowling alley.

“Steve Crump produces documentaries that enlighten the community about civil rights struggles,” Post Publisher Gerald Johnson said in 2019. “He has brilliantly used pen and camera to tell stories of historical significance.”

The Harding movie, “9/4/57,” a retrospective of the day Dorothy Counts desegregated the formerly all-white student body, debuted on the 50th anniversary of Counts’ enrollment.

Mr. Crump said the inspiration for “9/4/57” was a Charlotte Post article that chronicled desegregation of Mecklenburg County’s public schools as well as a court victory that wiped out segregation at Revolution Golf Course.

“The philosophy I have in making documentaries is connecting the dots,” he said in a 2007 interview. “(The Post) told the story in print; we’re telling it with video.”

Even amid years of cancer treatments, Mr. Crump continued telling those stories.

“I need to check with my wife to see how far this is going to go,” he said in 2020. “But we’ve got a couple of things that we may be eyeing between now and the end of the year, I hope.”

Mr. Crump and his wife Cathy in 2020 donated a collection of nearly 30 films and corresponding papers to the University of South Carolina Libraries and Center for Civil Rights History and Research. The videos, interview footage and documents include key personalities and events in Black history such as desegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg public schools; sit-in pioneer Franklin McCain; the Tuskegee Airmen and the Friendship Nine lunch counter protests in Rock Hill.

“From the standpoint of disassembling everything [there were] boxes of tapes and scripts and notes and those kinds of things accumulating dust around the house,” Mr. Crump told the Post. “I tend to save a lot of my stuff but never realized that it would be repurposed in this fashion, so it seemed like a good opportunity and considering the fact that some of these people that we’ve interviewed over the years have passed on, you want their stories to be preserved. So, in that vein it provided a very unique opportunity for preservation.”

Said Dr. Bobby Donaldson, director of USC Libraries and Center for Civil Rights History and Research in 2020: “The interviews and footage contained in this expansive collection are an invaluable resource for educators and scholars, especially historians of the civil rights movement.  This acquisition will allow us to include extraordinary footage from Mr. Crump’s documentaries on subjects like Rock Hill’s Friendship Nine, students who served 30-day sentences after sitting in at a local lunch counter in our Justice for All: South Carolina and the American Civil Rights Movement exhibit.”

Mr. Crump mentored generations of broadcast journalists, which earned him the newsroom moniker “Crump Daddy.” The nickname was a reminder of what Mr. Crump called “the highest compliment I ever got” – from WBTV reporter/anchor Jamie Boll, who referred to him on the air as “the conscience of our newsroom.”

“He knows what really matters,” Boll said in an interview with The Post, “and it keeps us as a station grounded in the community we serve.”  

Although he developed his storytelling skills as a youngster in Louisville, Mr. Crump was proud to have worked and lived in Charlotte, where that gift was honed.

“This is a great place,” he said. “I found something here that a lot of people never find – stability, a welcoming environment and a place of opportunity.”

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