♪♪ >> Dr. Frances Draper, publisher of the AFRO, next on "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, diverse representation and perspectives, equity, and inclusion is critical to meeting the needs of our colleagues, customers, and communities.

We are focused on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion both inside our company and in the communities where we live and work.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives and in our communities.

Wells Fargo -- the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute -- through API's Energy Excellence Program, our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural-gas and oil industry around the world.

Learn more at api.org/apiEnergyExcellence.

Reynolds American, dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against racism and discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

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♪♪ >> We're so honored today to have a representative of one of African-America's historic families, the Murphy family.

The Reverend Dr. Frances "Toni" Draper, publisher of the AFRO, welcome to "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> Dr. Chavis, thank you.

It is an honor to be with you today.

That's a whole lot of names and titles.

>> I mean, your family has done so much, and I want our audience to know about the Murphy family.

Tell us, how did the AFRO -- What was it?

130... >> 131.

>> 131 years.

>> How much time you have?

>> Uh, we got a few minutes, but I want to go back to the beginning.

>> Let me give you the CliffsNotes version as it's been passed down to us.

>> Very good.

>> And, so, my great-grandfather John Henry Murphy Sr. was an enslaved person, served in the Civil War, was free as a part of what Maryland promised those who served on the Union side.

At the age of 52, with 10 children, he started this paper when reportedly less than 2% of the black population could read.

I said "reportedly" because, you know, you always have to check the sources.

But he went on and he did this with $200 that he -- Well, it depends on who tells the story.

So, if the women of the family tell the story, they say he borrowed this $200, and the men say, "No, they were one," so she gave him the $200."

But, nonetheless, the name AFRO and the printing press were already in existence.

Can you believe that?

In 1892.

He had been the publisher of the Hagerstown District of the AME Church's publication called The Sunday School Helper.

But he was a printer before he was a publisher, and the AFRO was a feed sheet.

You know what a feed sheet is, Dr. Chavis?

>> I think I do, but tell our audience, what's a feed sheet?

>> A feed sheet advertise feed for the pigs and cows that walked through the streets of Baltimore.

So my understanding -- >> It was something that was printed.

>> Something that was printed, that it was a one-pager.

And so that's what he was doing.

And the people who actually ran that company were preachers.

But they were better preachers than they were publishers.

And John Murphy, when the name and the printing press went up for an auction, he was able to buy it with that $200.

So that started that legacy.

I've already said that John and Martha Howard -- I didn't call her name, but Martha Howard Murphy had 10 children -- five male children, five female children.

And they all came into the business.

My grandfather Carl he tapped to be the heir, if you would.

But Carl was a professor of German at Howard.

>> German language.

>> German language.

He was the chair of Howard's German language -- >> How does a brother learn German language?

>> I have no idea.

I just know we had to listen to German opera growing up when you went to his house.

We were like, "Oh, no, no."

But it was -- I guess that was something we needed to do.

I followed in his footsteps in terms of not German language, but French and Spanish language.

>> Right.

>> But he was a professor at Howard.

He would come to Baltimore on the weekends to help his dad.

And when his dad died, in 1922, Carl became the publisher.

And all the brothers worked in the paper.

Not the sisters.

But Great-Grandfather John said, "Whatever you pay yourselves, you have to pay your sisters."

There was one of the sisters who -- That was a good deal, though, wasn't it?

>> That was a pretty good deal.

But it was a family-run business.

>> It was a family-run business.

But each of the brothers had a role, as I said.

So, Carl was the editor.

Another brother was in charge of circulation.

Somebody was in charge of advertising.

They each had a role.

Carl, much to, I think, his somewhat disappointment -- I don't think he was totally disappointed -- he had five girls.

He had no boys.

So just he had girls, and all of them, except for one, were trained in journalism.

If you wanted to go to college in Maryland during that time -- when I say "that time," that was in the '40s -- you had to go to the Black College.

If they did not offer the major that you wanted, then the state of Maryland would pay your tuition to go out of state.

Morgan did not have a journalism major, so my mother and her sisters went -- My mother went to the University of Wisconsin.

So did one of her sisters.

Somebody went to the University of Wisconsin -- I mean -- I said Wisconsin -- Minnesota.

And my mom said when she got there, people looked at her -- and she's about your complexion, Dr. Chavis -- and wanted to know if there was a Mardi Gras.

>> What?

>> They had never seen a black person.

>> Wow.

>> She said she called her grandfather -- her father, my grandfather, and said, "I can't do this.

I need to come back to Baltimore."

He said, "The state of Maryland is paying your tuition, your room and board, your books.

You can do this."

>> So, rather than allow blacks to go to the University of Maryland, they were paying for blacks to go out of state to another university.

>> Correct.

>> At state expense.

>> At state expense.

>> Racism is expensive.

>> It is expensive on so many levels.

>> So, today, after 131 years, what's your outlook of journalism in general, but particularly for the African-American-owned press?

>> So, journalism in general is important.

In order for democracy to succeed, we have to have a free and independent press.

The Black Press is about the most free and independent press.

The black -- Let me make a distinction.

The black-owned press.

If we don't have good, quality journalism, then we are subjected to opinions and stories that don't benefit us.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> This is almost reminiscent of what happened when the AFRO and other black newspapers were started.

I mean, you know, John Russwurm, Sam Cornish said, in 1827, "We wish to plead our own cause.

Too long have others spoken for us."

When they found the Freedom's Journal.

And, so, here we are almost 200 years later still pleading our own cause, still writing stories from our own perspective and our own angle.

So journalism is key.

Black newspapers are an integral part.

And we can't just do the sound bites.

I'm a big social-media person myself, but they're sound bites, and a lot of them are opinions.

And so we have to help ourselves be better informed about what's really going on.

>> So, in 2027 will mark the bicentennial, 200th anniversary, of the Black Press of America.

And, certainly, the AFRO is one of the leading -- still published all these years.

Do you see young peoples interested in journalism today?

Do you see a future for the black press?

>> There's definitely a future.

Young people are excited about journalism and about the stories.

See, the methods have changed.

So -- People say to me, "Well, technology is replacing the industry."

Technology is helping us to get our story out.

A.I.

is helping us to get our story out.

You know, we've got to be careful about A.I.

That's another whole discussion.

What I find young people are most excited about, Dr. Chavis, is understanding where we've come from, and they're very, very engaged.

They didn't get a black-history course.

They didn't live through what you and I lived through.

And so they don't have that first-person frame of reference.

But when something happens in this country, the first people on that line, the first people going to protest usually are the young people.

They're very passionate about this and they're passionate about journalism.

So, over a third of our staff are young people.

>> Really?

Oh, that's great.

>> And they're not all in the social-media department.

They just -- They love, yes, our archives, but they love being a part of something where they're helping to move our people forward.

>> As a black woman entrepreneur, a business leader, distinguished publisher of the AFRO, what do you see the role of black women going forward in America?

We know that during the last election, black women came out and voted in record numbers.

Do you see this participation continuing to grow?

>> Absolutely.

So, still the hand -- and I want to, you know, take a liberty -- the black hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

And so I think women have a very, very important role to play, as do men.

I don't think it's one or the other, but I do think black women have risen to the point of real leadership in this country, not just in the vice presidency and not just at the Supreme Court, but if you look at Corporate America, you see a lot of black women.

And long overdue.

>> Yes.

>> Look at the boardrooms.

Black women are starting to infiltrate the boardrooms across the country.

So I think that there's definitely a role for black women.

Black women tend to be organized, as well, in terms of our civic organizations, our sororities, and our neighborhood associations.

Black women helped, as you know, to get the -- If it wasn't for black women, I don't think the vote would have gotten out the way it did in the last election.

>> Exactly.

You're also an ordained minister.

>> Mm-hmm.

>> Can you comment on the importance of the -- not just the intersection, but the collaboration between the Black Press and the Black Church?

>> So, we have to go back a little bit in history, don't we?

>> Yes.

>> The Black Church, the Black Press, and black civil-rights organizations have always worked together.

Different roles, same cause.

They're -- The Black Church, for example, owned the property free and clear, usually, where the Black Press or black civil-rights organizations could even gather -- right?

-- to talk about that.

And so you had buildings that -- >> It was the only place we could have a mass meeting.

>> Only place you could have a meeting.

>> Right.

>> The only place, you know, that belonged to us was the Black Church, in terms of buildings, right?

The Black Press is under a lot of pressure in 2023, but not like it was 200 years ago.

The economics around the Black Press at first were just -- It was just based on circulation.

You didn't have companies advertising there, right?

But you had the Black Church that was helping to push the message of "buy black."

You had black organizations that were pushing that message.

And we still need to do that today.

So, I think that the partnership between the three is in need of some strengthening, but still there.

>> That's very important, because I attend some of the national conventions, and, you know, one of the concerns is the movement has become kind of siloed.

You know, the church is over here, the professional organizations.

I love the Divine Nine.

We've got strong sororities, fraternities.

But, at some point, all of us having to work together is always somehow a challenge.

Some of it is because of how our organizations are funded, the economic base.

You, being an entrepreneur, you know the importance of that Black Dollar circulating more than one time in the black community.

So, can you comment about what has the Murphy family learned about the importance of owning businesses in the black community?

>> Well, one thing I think we've learned, as other black business owners have learned, when you own it, it's very hard for somebody to tell you how to run it and what to do about it.

Now, you don't own it in a vacuum.

You're part of an ecosystem that still has to access capital, has to access relationships that are not just all black, right?

But the fact that we own the business makes a difference.

The fact that we are a black-owned media company -- We don't even call ourselves a newspaper.

We're a media company.

No one is telling us what to write.

We don't have to get permission from somebody over here to say, "Well, you can't write this story."

And I know that what I'm saying, you know, is right, because we've had journalists to leave the AFRO and go work for majority-owned publications and come running back because the stories that they would write for us -- when they came to us and said, "Hey, I think this is a good story," if it was a good story, it was a good story.

When they got to mainstream media, they said, "Nope, no room for this story.

This is the angle that we want, because this is how we're portraying people in this particular area.

This is what we want you to support.

We don't want to hear about this over there.

We don't have space for that."

Now, in fairness to them, we have all the space in the world.

In fact, you know, technology has taught us that we're not time-constrained or space-constrained, right?

We can post 24/7.

If we have the staff to do it, we can continue to do that.

>> So, you see yourself -- you're a multi-media company, not just a newspaper.

>> Oh, we're a multi-media company.

We do like you do.

We do live shows.

You know, we're on every social-media platform.

We have nearly 700,000 followers on Facebook.

We're trying to get 20,000 on IG.

We have 14,000 now.

We're on LinkedIn.

We're on TikTok.

We're on all of those platforms, wherever we can get the message out.

As I said, those are ways to get the message out.

They're not the message.

That's what we're using today.

Who knows what we'll be using 10 years from now?

And so, as a media company, we have to keep up with that.

And we are launching -- You're the first to hear this publicly.

We are launching a brand-new product, something we're calling AFRO Media Walls.

And we've gone into business establishments.

Let me go back a little bit.

We received a grant to do a proof of concept.

There are a lot of companies who are interested in how journalism is evolving and how we can keep it going, because, as we already said, local journalism is so important.

And, so, we received a grant to do a proof of content.

Here's our idea.

Our idea is that if we put video screens inside of business establishments that have all of our -- nothing but our content on there, that businesses would advertise to be there.

It would bring traffic to the business.

And I didn't say this, but I want to say this.

It also gives that business owner data on who's coming in.

So it's geofencing, as well.

So it lets the business owner know who came into their store, not in terms of their name, not "Dr. Ben Chavis came into the store," but, you know, "An African-American male came into the store, he stayed this many minutes, and this is where he went next."

So for a business owner who wants to track their own traffic, we'll give them that data, because everybody is into data and analytics in this day and age.

And so people want to know who's buying, who's not buying.

And, so, we have put up 10 screens in Baltimore County, because we have a great subscriber base there.

The screens, you know, just look like any other TV screen.

You've seen them in filling stations, gas stations, for example.

The bottom part, the apron, has our name and information on it.

Others can buy ads on it.

And it's just our content.

There's no audio to this.

These are actually video walls.

It's not the big -- great, big video walls.

They're the size of a regular TV screen you might see in a barbershop.

In fact, barbershops, hairdressers, you know, restaurants, places that people -- >> And what is the name, again, it's called?

>> We're calling it -- It's the AFRO Media Wall.

>> AFRO Media Wall.

That's a great concept.

>> Thank you.

So, we believe it's going to work.

Another one of our publishers has it on a smaller scale, and we are going to share that information with others, as well, once we figure out how it all works.

>> You know, that's great for the business, it's great for the AFRO, but also it gives you, like, that data.

We live in society that's data-driven.

>> You're absolutely right.

We have content -- I tell our people all the time, we have content that other people don't have.

I'm not just talking about our archival content, even though we have 3 million photographs.

And you know we're building a building -- Well, our 501(c)(3) is building a building to house a collection, make it more accessible to the public.

>> How many photographs did you say you had?

>> 3 million.

>> 3 million photographs.

>> 3 million photographs, and artifacts that we are discovering every day.

So, two years ago, we discovered a big -- What do you call those things?

It's a reel-to-reel thing that -- And all it said was "Thurgood."

That's all it said.

So, we sent it out to have it transcribed.

We could hear the voices, right?

We could recognize Thurgood Marshall's voice.

We could recognize Carl Murphy's voice.

They're talking about the Brown v. Board of Education brief.

>> That's invaluable.

>> That's what they're talking about.

And Thurgood Marshall says to Carl Murphy, "The boys down at the white newspaper -- they want me to tell them what's in this brief.

I told them I had no comment."

That's how he talked.

He said, "But for the AFRO, I got a comment."

And so they talked about how they were going to work with the NAACP to have some kind of meeting to talk about what this brief, as he called it -- what -- And, so, we know how significant the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was in 1954.

But who knew?

And they didn't have laws then that said, "Okay, you have to let somebody know that you're recording them."

They were just having a conversation, and my grandfather recorded.

If you called the AFRO, best believe he recorded the conversation.

>> That's great.

>> Including the conversations of every employee, because, you know, you had a switchboard.

So, calls would come in, and my grandfather wasn't any more than 5 foot tall.

He sat behind this big horseshoe desk, and I didn't even know until I was much older that he had that recording device underneath his desk.

>> Well, now you have people say, "On the record."

You have the record.

>> We have the record.

And a nice thing about our archives and any other newspaper archive is that on the back of the photos, you have the names of who the people are.

So we are -- When we went to do our coverage of the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, we just go back on our archives.

Carl Murphy sent every single employee that we had.

>> At the White House recently, they just had an observance of the tragedy of Emmett Till.

But we all know if it hadn't been for the Black Press documenting, what happened to Emmett Till, no one would know that name today.

>> That's correct.

If it hadn't been for the Black Press really documenting the George Floyd story, the Breonna Taylor story -- right?

-- you really wouldn't know what happened.

>> The stories right in Baltimore that happened.

>> Freddie Gray.

>> Freddie Gray.

>> Exactly.

>> Well, Dr. Draper, you already got under your belt 131 years.

What's the future of the AFRO look like?

>> I think the future of the AFRO is bright, as it is for other black media outlets, especially black-owned media outlets.

Why?

Because we are constantly creating content.

When I say "we," I'm not talking about the AFRO.

I'm talking we as people.

>> Yes.

>> We are complicated.

We're not monolithic.

There's a lot about the black community that even -- let's be honest about -- even the Black Press doesn't cover.

So we're not going to run out of content.

And the way the country is going now, we're not going to run out of issues and controversies and things to really not just write about, but to comment on and to try to make a difference.

It's one thing to report that something happened.

People can do that.

They can report every crime in America, as they are prone to do.

We can interpret it differently.

We're the ones that talk about what the solutions are for our community.

We are part of the community, so we don't have to try to figure out how we fit, how do we get the story?

We can still call our neighbor up.

We can call our mama and them, you know?

We can call up folk and get the scoop for stories.

I'll give you one example of that.

I use it often.

Our former mayor, Catherine Pugh -- when she was going through her legal battle and when she was deciding whether or not to resign as mayor, well, she called me up and she said, "Toni, I'm going to resign tomorrow.

'A,' can you come to my house for prayer?

'B,' I want the AFRO to have it first."

Right?

This is what she said to me.

So we talked about how that was going to work.

And, indeed, she said, "Here's what I want you to do.

I'm going to release the statement to you.

We're going to call a press conference."

She said, "The press conference -- as soon as the lawyer says, 'Good afternoon,' you push the button and post the story."

That's what we did.

>> So you got the scoop -- >> We got the scoop.

And CNN called me.

I didn't talk with them.

They left a message.

They wanted to know, what was our source?

Was it really true?

I didn't dignify them by calling them back.

>> Power to Black Press.

>> Power to Black Press.

>> Are the young people in the Murphy family still committed to keeping operations going?

>> Some of them are, and we recognize that it's not just our family.

It's a family-owned business, but a family expands beyond the descendants of John Murphy Sr. Our family has gone in a lot of different directions.

I'm fourth generation.

We absolutely have fifth-generation members already involved.

>> Great.

>> We have sixth-generation members who have been involved.

And our first seventh-generation person was born in April of 2023.

She's going to be involved.

She just doesn't know it yet.

>> You have a legacy plotted out.

>> We have legacy plotted out.

And we are hopeful that, you know, the family will continue to do this.

I mean, I didn't want to do it.

Our generation had an unwritten pact, Dr. Chavis.

We said, "We're not doing this," because we heard it every day of our lives.

>> Particularly in the Murphy family.

>> Right.

>> So, congratulations on the success of the AFRO.

>> Thank you.

>> The Reverend Dr. Toni Draper, thank you for joining "The Chavis Chronicles."

>> The pleasure has been mine.

Thank you for the invitation.

>> For more information about "The Chavis Chronicles" and our guest, please visit our website at... Also, follow us on Facebook, X, formerly known as Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Major funding for "The Chavis Chronicles" is provided by the following.

At Wells Fargo, diverse representation and perspectives, equity, and inclusion is critical to meeting the needs of our colleagues, customers, and communities.

We are focused on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion both inside our company and in the communities where we live and work.

Together, we want to make a tangible difference in people's lives and in our communities.

Wells Fargo -- the bank of doing.

American Petroleum Institute -- through API's Energy Excellence Program, our members are committed to accelerating safety, environmental, and sustainability progress throughout the natural-gas and oil industry around the world.

Learn more at api.org/apiEnergyExcellence.

Reynolds American, dedicated to building a better tomorrow for our employees and communities.

Reynolds stands against racism and discrimination in all forms and is committed to building a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

At AARP, we are committed to ensuring your money, health, and happiness live as long as you do.

♪♪