Judge Sara J. Harper passed away on July 8, 2025, days short of her 99th birthday. Out of the limelight for the last decade, as her health declined, Judge Harper was a trailblazer for women and particularly women of color. Her legacy should not be forgotten.
When Sara Juanita Harper was born in 1926, Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States. Along with Carl and Louis Stokes, she grew up in public housing in the Outhwaite neighborhood of Cleveland. She attended Cleveland public schools, as President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal attempted to bring the nation out of the Great Depression and Black Americans struggled for their rightful place in America.
She was 15 years old when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. By the end of World War II, she had graduated from high school. When she graduated from college in 1948, Harry Truman was president. America had entered the nuclear age, but America was still a largely segregated society.
When she graduated from Western Reserve University College of Law in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. Two years before the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated schools in America, Sara Harper became the first Black woman to earn a law degree from that institution. James R. Willis, a U.S. Marine Corp veteran who had trained at the segregated Marine base in Fort Montford, North Carolina, and who would go on to be one of Cleveland’s premier criminal lawyers, was her classmate.
Unlike law school graduates today, an aspiring Black lawyer in the early 1950s did not have a lot of options, especially women. Even future Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who graduated the same year as Judge Harper, could not find a job as a lawyer, although she graduated at the top of her class from Standford Law School. One law firm offered her a secretarial job!
Sara Harper was very fortunate. She got a job as an assistant city prosecutor and then an assistant law director for the City of Cleveland.
A lifetime Republican, her first venture into politics was as the Republican Party’s endorsed candidate for state representative when she was 27 years old. She did not win the seat. But her opportunity came in 1970. Governor James Rhodes appointed her to a seat on the Cleveland Municipal Court, making her the second Black woman judge in Ohio, following Judge Lillian E. Burke, who had been appointed in 1969. Judge Harper would serve with distinction on the Cleveland Municipal Court until 1990, when she was elected to the Eighth District Court of Appeals. That year marked the election of two Black women to the Court of Appeals. Both Judge Harper and Judge Patricia Anne Blackmon were elected, making them the first two Black women to sit on a Court of Appeals in Ohio.
During some of her years on the municipal court, she served with her husband, Judge George W. Trumbo, making them the only Black husband and wife duo to serve as judges in the State of Ohio. She and Judge Trumbo were married for 64 years until he passed away in 2014. Together they raised five children.
Judge Harper has many firsts associated with her name. She was the first Black woman to sit by assignment on the Ohio Supreme Court. In 1972, President Richard Nixon commissioned her to the United States Marine Corp to become the first female military judge in the history of the Marine Corp. She served with distinction until her retirement in 1986.
While busy as a judge, Judge Harper also found time to serve as president of the Cleveland NAACP from 1982- 1985. Always committed to her community and having a strong commitment to education, she founded the Stay in School Project, which in eight years enrolled over 17,000 students in local schools and distributed $150,000 in U.S. Saving Bonds for perfect attendance and academic achievement. One of the things that she was most proud of was the Sara J. Harper Library, opened in the 1990s in the Outhwaite neighborhood where she grew up. She also founded the first victims’ rights program in the nation, advocating for victims of crime.
In 2021 the Volunteers of America broke ground for the Sara J. Harper Village, located in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood. It provides affordable housing for female veterans unable to fend for themselves or their families. It is located near the Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center. It demonstrates just another example of the legacy of care and giving that Judge Harper left to her community.
Currently there are six Black judges on the general division of the Common Pleas Court, one in Juvenile Court and one in Domestic Relations. Of the thirteen judges of the Cleveland Municipal Court, seven are Black. Women outnumber the men on Cleveland Municipal Court, the Common Pleas Court and the Eighth District Court of Appeals. Two African Americans sit on the United States Supreme Court.
Back in 1926 when Sara Harper was an infant, this kind of representation in the judiciary by women and people of color and would have been unfathomable. But such were the changes in America during the lifetime of a remarkable jurist and remarkable human being.
A wake for Judge Harper will be held at the EF Boyd Funeral home, 2165 East 89thStreet, on Thursday, July 17 from 1- 7pm. Funeral services will be held Friday, July 18 at 11am at Mount Olive Missionary Baptist Church 3290 East 126th Street in Cleveland.
C. Ellen Connally is a retired judge of the Cleveland Municipal Court. From 2010 to 2014 she served as the President of the Cuyahoga County Council. An avid reader and student of American history, she is a former member of the Board of the Ohio History Connection, and past president of the Cleveland Civil War Round Table, and is currently vice president of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers and Sailors Monument Commission. She holds degrees from BGSU, CSU and is all but dissertation for a PhD from the University of Akron.