New Life for 129-Year Archive of Historic Black-Owned Newspaper

As the story often gets told, even among people in John H. Murphy Sr.’s familial lineage, in 1892 he launched the Afro American Newspaper Co., whose reach eventually extended from its Baltimore headquarters to 13 East Coast cities.

But the fuller truth is that his wife came up with the cash to make that venture happen. “She came with $200 to purchase the name and the printing press,” Savannah Wood said of her great-great-great-grandmother Martha Elizabeth Howard. Before she became Mrs. Murphy, that daughter of a Black farm owner sold some Maryland acreage that her formerly enslaved forebears had amassed.

“She had the money,” Wood said. “The paper has done a good job of telling her story, but it’s listed elsewhere as him being the founder, instead of the two of them being founders. Men always get to shine. But the women in our family have been doing a lot of labor for a long time.”

Wood, 32, is latest of those Murphy-descended women to shape how The Afro American, the nation’s longest-running Black-owned newspaper, forges on. With a $535,000 grant from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s #StartSmall initiative, she is leading efforts to digitize more than 129 years of Afro Americanarchives and to move them to a mansion in the Old West Baltimore Historic District, which long had been an all-Black area.

“It’s kind of like a homecoming,” said artist and fine art photographer Wood, who returned to Baltimore from Los Angeles to lead the endeavor. “The archives will to be in the basement. The first floor will have a reading room for researchers ... The carriage house will be reserved for community events. Phase two of the restoration of this historic mansion will allow for larger gatherings and symposia.”

Included in the archives will be printed editions of the newspaper, 3 million photographs, registries of who attended African American events, business records, reporters’ notebooks, including ones from foreign correspondents on the payroll of the Afro American, a weekly, which now has 700,000 followers on social media and 20,000 subscribers.

“This archive is extremely important,” said the Rev. Dr. Frances “Toni” Draper, The Afro American’s publisher and CEO and Wood’s aunt. “It chronicles African American history. It includes images and stories not published anyplace else. The uniqueness and variety of the collection’s stories, photos, artifacts, recordings is important right now, especially, in light of all the talk around critical race theory and the accurate teaching of history.”

The digitization project is in its early stages, with Wood and archivists from Johns Hopkins University organizing contents of more than 1,000 sometimes worn-out 10-by-12-by-15-inch banker storage boxes that had been at historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore. The team is testing which kinds of metadata will yield the most robust results when the archives eventually become available online.

Journalist-author Wayne Dawkins, a multimedia professor in Morgan’s School of Global Journalism & Communication, has written three books tracking histories of Black journalists and has just contracted to write a fourth: a dual biography of pioneering sports writers Sam Lacy, who wrote for the Afro American, and Wendell Smith, formerly of the Pittsburgh Courier. Both men are on the roster of writers who are Baseball Hall of Fame inductees.

“They lobbied to desegregate baseball,” said Dawkins, also an Afro American op-ed writer. “They are important in journalism, and their journalism was transformative. They helped change American society before the modern Civil Rights era even began — at a time when baseball was much more than just an American sport.”

The Pittsburgh Courier and Afro American, Dawkins added, were part of a triumvirate of the most widely circulated and activist-oriented Black newspapers. Rounding out that trio was the Chicago Defender, which was instrumental in the Great Migration of Southern Blacks to the North.

Named “Innovator of the Year” by the Local Media Association, Draper, who covered community events for The Afro American during her adolescence, said recent events give The Afro American’s archive project even more urgency and importance: “We went to Tulsa when it happened 100 years ago. We carried that story week after week. People’s interest in so much of this history seems even higher now, post-George Floyd — as we look more closely at the structures that led to [the murder of] George Floyd.”

Among recent projects emanating from the archives, ahead of the #StartSmall grant, is To the Front: Black Women and the Vote, a special edition magazine that Afro Charities, the newspaper’s nonprofit arm, released in 2020, the 100th anniversary of the constitutional amendment that initially mainly gave well-to-do white women the right to vote. That was one of several bi-annual publications and commissions of artists’ work, based on the archives, that the nonprofit plans to produce.

Wood, also the executive director of Afro Charities, said she expects an array of other groundbreaking work to come out of the archives as a variety of professionals, artisans, grassroots advocates, and others gain access to the completed online trove.

“The archives can be reinterpreted by artists and scholars and others to create new meaning that really connects people with history,” Wood said. “Some of the photos already are available online, but they’re barely a glimpse of the full collection.

“There are all these pieces of ephemera that people have never seen before ... that tell the story behind the story. This will be a hub for us to see our past, present, and future, to imagine all the things our forebears have gone through and what we can do based on their labor and sacrifice.”