How The AFRO newspaper came to be depends on who you ask, said Rev. Dr. Frances Murphy Draper, great-granddaughter of the newspaper’s founder, John H. Murphy Sr.
If you ask the men in the family, Murphy Sr.’s wife, Martha–Draper’s great-grandmother–gifted her husband $200 to buy The AFRO name and a printing press at an auction. But if you ask the women in the family, the money was a loan, said Draper, who is the newspaper’s CEO and publisher, as well as the senior pastor at the Freedom Temple A.M.E. Zion Church.
Regardless of who has the origin story right, Murphy Sr. founded The Afro-American Newspaper, the longest continuously running black family-owned newspaper in the United States, in the Upton community of West Baltimore in 1892.
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