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bankruptcy in 1896, subsequently combining it with the Ledger, run by Reverend
George Bragg in 1900 (under the short-lived name, Afro-American Ledger). By the
end of the first decade of the 20th century, Murphy had made the Afro a family-run
business with a strong focus on and close relationship to the freedom movement.

The paper took a more explicitly political turn in 1922 when John H.
Murphy's son, Carl, became president and publisher. Carl Murphy was born in
Baltimore in 1889 and grew up in the city, attending Bethel AME church and
working with his siblings on the Afro. Carl Murphy proved to be academically
gifted. After graduating from Baltimore's Colored High School in 1907, he left
town to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., and upon graduation won a
fellowship to Harvard graduate school, where he was one of only two Black
students. He received a M.A. in German from Harvard in 1913 and took up
advanced studies at Jena University in Germany - studies that were cut short by
World War I. Murphy then returned to Howard as a professor of German in 1914
were he remained, except for a short stint in the military (where the racism of white
U.S. troops made a strong impression on him), until his father requested in 1919
that he come back to Baltimore to work on the Afro. Evidently fed up with the
narrowness and accomodationalism of the Howard administration, and anxious to
be involved with the world beyond the academy, Murphy abandoned his
extraordinary academic career and returned home to become the Afro's editor.
Three years later, after his father's death, he became president and publisher. By
the Depression, Carl Murphy had established himself at the center of freedom
movement in Baltimore, Maryland, and indeed in the United States. Aside from
publishing the Afro, Murphy was, a member of the executive board of the Baltimore
Urban League and chair of the legal committee of the Baltimore NAACP, a
member of the Maryland Interracial Commission appointed in 1925 by Governor
Ritchie, and a member of the national board of the NAACP. Murphy would