Carl Murphy

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Carl Murphy was born on January 17, 1889. He was an African-American Journalist, publisher, civil rights leader, and educator.

[edit] Biography

Murphy was born in Baltimore, Maryland; his parents were John Henry Murphy Sr. and Martha Howard Murphy. He was graduated from Howard University 1911, Harvard University in 1913, and at the University of Jena in Berlin also in 1913. Murphy served as a professor of German and chairman of the German department at Howard University between 1913 and 1918 It was in that year he joined the staff of The Baltimore Afro-American newspaper, run by his father John Murphy Sr.

In 1922, upon his father's death, Carl assumed control of the paper and in the next four decades solidified the Afro's place as a major African American newspaper. At its peak, the Afro American published more than a dozen editions in Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; and Newark, New Jersey.

In addition to his responsibilities to the Afro, the younger Murphy became actively involved with the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. In December 1932, he declared the NAACP's intention to challenge racial segregation at the University of Maryland. By 1935, with the help of NAACP attorneys Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP forced open the university's law school, with a strategy that would be used successfully across the Jim Crow South. Perhaps Carl Murphy's most significant single contribution to the Baltimore African American cause came in 1935 when he engineered the election of Lillie Carroll Jackson to the presidency of the local NAACP branch. A perfect complement to Murphy's more subtle leadership style, the straightforward and tireless Jackson remained in the post until 1970.

To peers and contemporaries, the diminutive Murphy was a giant. Following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Thurgood Marshall publicly acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Murphy. For his efforts on behalf of civil rights, the NAACP awarded him its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal, in 1955. Morgan State University, on whose board Murphy had served as a trustee for decades, named its Fine Arts Center in his honor. Carl Murphy died on February 26, 1967.

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