Steve Crump, revered WBTV reporter and documentarian, dies of colon cancer

Steve Crump, the relentlessly positive, long-serving WBTV reporter who became a cancer-awareness activist after a 2018 diagnosis that some feared would take his life much more quickly, died Thursday morning after a yearslong battle with the colorectal form of the disease.

He was 65, and spent far more than half his life — just shy of four decades — as a journalist at Channel 3 in Charlotte. WBTV announced Crump’s passing Thursday afternoon.

The news came just over two months after Crump had hosted a “Five Year Cancer Survivors Brunch” to thank family, friends and colleagues who had supported him through his journey, and for which he had mementos made that read: “On July 22 2018 my cancer diagnosis continued with one doctor suggesting that I be placed in hospice. We found a successful second opinion and five years later we’re still here.”

Less than a week later, he shared a photo to his social media of himself with various tubes affixed to his chest with a caption announcing that he was “back in the pokey,” as he’d grown fond of calling the hospital over the years.

It would wind up serving as his final public appearance on any media format.

A great-great-grandson of slaves and fifth-generation Roman Catholic, Crump grew up in Louisville, Kentucky’s historically Black Smoketown neighborhood. He often credited his storytelling skills to listening as a boy to three generations of his family reflect at the kitchen table on hardscrabble existences in the heart of Kentucky’s Bourbon country during the Antebellum South.

He earned a communications degree in 1980 from Eastern Kentucky University, developing a keen interest in civil rights and social justice along the way, then bounced around the country in various reporting and anchoring jobs for the first few years of the ’80s.

It was shortly before he started working at WBTV that cancer changed the course of his life for the first time.

On Valentine’s Day in 1984, when he was 26 years old and working at WKYT in Lexington, Kentucky, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The next month, Crump told The Charlotte Observer in a 2019 interview, his stepfather pulled him aside on their way into a church service and said: “Alright, here’s what we’re up against: She’s started radiation. If the treatments take, she’s probably got six months with us. If they don’t work out, she may have six weeks.”

Joyce Spalding died less than 48 hours later. Crump was still grieving when he took the job at Channel 3 and moved to Charlotte in April.

Over the course of his career at the station, Crump earned the respect of colleagues, viewers and even his competition by charging headlong into overseas assignments in Sudan and Bosnia, natural-disaster coverage, violent protests and assorted other dangers.

But he also channeled his passion for stories about issues concerning the African American experience by developing and producing a long list of documentaries, mostly for broadcast on North Carolina public television but also several that were distributed nationally to PBS stations. Friends say he made these films — highlighting subjects ranging from Martin Luther King Jr.’s last days and lunch counter sit-ins in the Carolinas to Black Catholics and Black jockeys — on his own time, and on his own dime.

“Steve could take just a tiny camera and have the ability to light it and (produce) superior audio to make it a first-class production,” said renowned civil rights photographer Cecil Williams, who Crump featured in his 2018 documentary “Orangeburg, 50 Years Later.” “He also was a one-man (team). To film his documentaries, in almost all the cases I saw, he did it alone.”

Added longtime friend Randall Pinkston, a retired CBS News correspondent, of Crump’s initiative: “We all work hard as journalists. We don’t really have business hours, so to speak; there’s no clock. But Steve, he just seemed to be possessing more energy than any human being could have.

“I don’t know when he slept.”

Crump won a raft of local Emmy Awards for both his film work and his TV reports over the years. His trophy case also included the 2013 Martin Luther King Jr. Medallion, which honors a Charlottean who has worked to promote racial equality and social justice; and North Carolina Humanities’ 2022 John Tyler Caldwell Award, for his dedication to documentary storytelling and in-depth news reporting.

In addition to being fiercely passionate about his work, he could be fiercely protective of his colleagues.

Molly Grantham, longtime anchor at WBTV, recalled being “a very young, green reporter” at the station in the mid-2000s when Crump overheard a member of the City Council being rude to her on the phone. “When I hung up, he picked up the phone and called that City Councilman — who he knew — and stood up for me, and told him never to treat his teammates like that again. ...

“Here was Steve Crump saying, That’s not OK.’”

Crump himself became the story, for the first time of significant note, when a stranger verbally accosted him while he was covering a hurricane in Charleston in 2016, calling Crump a “slave” and worse. It was an ugly exchange that Crump and his cameraman documented and reported on. Other media outlets picked it up from there. (The man eventually made a public apology.)

The second time Crump found himself in the news, it was for a much different and even more concerning reason.

Initially, he revealed on air, in August 2018, only that he was taking a leave of absence due to an unspecified health problem. It wasn’t until the following year that Crump began opening up about what was going on: He was diagnosed with colon cancer that had spread to his liver the previous July, and the scare was serious. How serious? Twelve hours after he was given the news, one doctor suggested hospice.

Crump survived a litany of scares, in fact: MRSA, septic shock, a collapsed lung, being on a ventilator, eating through a feeding tube, chemotherapy, dramatic weight loss.

“There were times when I would visit him,” says longtime friend and WBTV colleague Al Conklin, “and I’d come home and I’d tell (my wife) Tracy, ‘I kind of feel like I just saw Steve for the last time.’ I’d bawl my eyes out for a few minutes, and then son of a gun if that cat didn’t turn around and call me up four days later and say, ‘Man, I’m feeling great — can’t wait to get outta here!’ And I’d go, What the — huh?

“I mean, this guy truly was a Superman. One of his idols was Muhammad Ali, and he definitely had that fighter’s spirit in him. It just kind of surpassed human understanding in a lot of ways.”

One of Crump’s happiest post-diagnosis days came when he was cleared in March 2019 to return to work at WBTV for a few hours a couple of days a week. “Back to what I love,” Crump said in an interview with the Observer that spring, his voice breaking and a single tear spilling over onto his cheek.

“I’m only here because of God’s grace and mercy, I’ll tell anybody that. ... Will I be what I was? Probably not. At the same time, I don’t want to die with my music still in me. I don’t want there to be a bushel over what light I have. And I still think that I’m in a position where I can contribute something.

“It’s been a great run. But I think I’ve got a few more stories left.”

And he did. More than expected. His health problems would persist — more cancer-fighting treatments would be necessary, a bacterial contamination of donated blood, Covid — but he kept insisting on telling stories on TV.

For a long time, though, those were pre-recorded, so he could do them at his own pace. But in June 2022, Crump did his first live shot after four years of not being out in the field, as part of coverage for WBTV on the passing of NASCAR Hall of Famer and track owner Bruton Smith. When the camera stopped rolling, he wept again.

“That’s how much I miss it, that’s how much I value what we do, and I think that’s how much this city and this community and the people here mean to me,” he said in a WBTV interview last year to mark four years since his diagnosis.

Just this past April, Crump was back in the hospital again due to complications related to his cancer. He ended up staying for 12 days.

Three weeks later, he was in his hometown of Louisville covering the Kentucky Derby festivities for a sister station of WBTV’s, something that has become a fairly regular annual gig for him. A week later, he did a story on Grammy Award-winning R&B singer Anthony Hamilton, a Charlotte hometown hero. The week after that, he had one on the history of Charlotte’s Double Door Inn.

“I used to see pictures of him when he would be getting treatments,” said Pinkston, the former CBS News correspondent. “I don’t know whether it’d be infusion or radiation, but he would be in the hospital with a laptop working on a script. ... All of us were saying, ‘Man, why don’t you sit on your — ... and relax.’ And he says, ‘No, man. I gotta do stuff,’ and, ‘Hey, I just went and I did an interview with such and such person for this story.’”

Pinkston laughed, incredulously, at the memory of his friend.

“Oh man,” he said, after getting his breath back. “That man was amazing. Amazing. Amazing. Mmm. Inspirational.”

Crump is survived by his wife of nearly eight years, Cathy.