Carl James Greenburg Murphy provided leadership and voice to the movement for social change in Maryland and America during the twentieth century. As the long-time president of the Afro American Newspaper Company, Murphy took up the cause of social justice in the 1910s. Success as an entrepreneur afforded Murphy freedom from intimidation and provided him the necessary influence for the behind-the-scenes maneuvering so crucial to bringing about change. Carl Murphy affiliated himself with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Working with both the national headquarters in New York, and the NAACP's Baltimore branch, Murphy's vision directed the ultimate triumph over racial segregation locally and beyond.

Born January 17, 1889, in Baltimore to a large, hard-working family, Carl early on learned the value of hard work, education, and civic responsibility. He graduated from Howard University (1911), Harvard University (1913), and the University of Jena in Berlin, Germany (also in 1913). In 1896, his father, John H. Murphy Sr. (1840-1922), purchased ownership of a weekly newspaper, the Afro American (founded in 1892), which served Baltimore's black community. Thirty years later, 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, DC, Richmond, Va., and Newark, N.J.

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.

Murphy soon became a figure of national stature. As the head of an influential newspaper, he stood with publishing colleagues across black America, including Robert L. Vann at the Pittsburgh Courier, C.B. Powell and Phillip M.H. Savory of the Amsterdam News, and Robert S. Abbott of the Chicago Defender as the most visible blacks to whom white politicians and civic leaders often turned when confronted with "race" issues. Not all of the attention they drew was well-intended. Murphy's uncompromising stances on racial and social justice led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to monitor him closely in the 1940s, though no charge of "un-American" activity was ever brought against him.

To peers and contemporaries, the diminutive Murphy was a giant. Following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court Decision in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (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.

Callcott, George H. Maryland & America, 1940 to 1980. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.

Kluger, Richard Simple Justice: The History of Brown V. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle For Equality. Rev. and expanded ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Washburn, Patrick S. A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press during World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Williams, Juan. Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary. New York: Times Books, 1998.