Alphonso Harper

Alphonso R. Harper, 89, died Saturday, March 12, 2011, at his home in Detroit. Born in 1921 in the mining town of Coalmont, Alabama, he was the son of the late Lomax and Mannie Bell Griffin Harper, the third of their five children. At age seventeen Al (as he was known among friends and family) took a job as a driver for a traveling shoe salesman, and saw a great deal of the southern United States during the next few years. Around 1940, seeking better employment opportunities, he caught a ride with the friend of a friend to Chicago and, finally, to Detroit, where he made a living parking cars and performing other odd jobs as he could get them. In 1942, with the U.S. at war, he joined the Army, and soon after was accepted for training in the Army Air Corps. Ultimately prevented from flying by his imperfect vision, he nevertheless treasured his position among the earliest of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, and remained active in the Airmen’s Detroit chapter until his death.

Honorably discharged from the service in April 1946, Al returned to Detroit and attended Wayne University (later Wayne State) and the Detroit College of Law on the GI Bill, receiving his LLB degree in 1950. At various times throughout the 1950s and 1960s he worked for the County of Wayne, for the Motown Record Corporation, for the Wayne National Insurance Company, and as an attorney in private practice. He also was active in Democratic politics and worked tirelessly for the extension of full social and political rights to all U.S. citizens, being among a select group of Detroit attorneys invited to the White House in 1963 to consult with President Kennedy on the role of lawyers in the Civil Rights Movement. By the end of the 1960s he had taken a position at the Detroit Recorder’s Court, from which he retired as Chief Judicial Assistant in 1991.

In 1946 Al married the former Frances Hurley, with whom he had two children, Judith and Alphonso, Jr. In 1959, the year after Frances’s death, he married the former Marian Swan, with whom he had two sons, Phillip and Roger. Known by all to have done everything in his own fashion, Al was an energetic talker and an avid storyteller, took great pleasure in traveling far and wide by car, and in his later years enjoyed dropping a coin or two at the MGM Grand casino in Detroit. He was the brother of the late Lester Harper and William Harper, and grandfather of the late Jimel Harper. In addition to Marian Harper, his wife of nearly 52 years, and his children, he is survived by his children’s spouses, Preston West, Thomas Freedman, and Jennifer White Harper; by his sisters, Alma Overstreet and Erecenia Davis; by grandsons Roger Harper, Jr., and Kyle Harper, and step-granddaughter Ebonnie West; by great-granddaughter Nyla Marzette; and by numerous nieces and nephews. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the United Negro College Fund.

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