A minister who headed the National Council of Churches, she was active in liberal causes in the 1990s and sought to counter the conservative Christian Coalition.
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.
Her death, in an assisted living center, was from 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.