Madeline W. Murphy
*Madeline W. Murphy was born on October 24, 1922. She was a Black writer and community activist.
Madeline Wheeler was born in Boston and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. She was the second of three children of Arthur E. Wheeler, Sr., and Madeline (née Hall) Brooks. Murphy attended Wilmington public schools and graduated from Howard High School as valedictorian.
She attended Temple University in Philadelphia for two years, where she met her husband-to-be, Judge William H. Murphy Sr., at a dance at a nearby university. The couple was married in 1942. They briefly lived in Delaware and Chicago before moving to Baltimore in 1945. After a year at Turner's Station, they moved to Cherry Hill, an all-Black lower-income neighborhood in the south section of Baltimore. Through her written word and civic engagement, she was a social, racial, and economic justice advocate.
During her sixty years in Baltimore, she was involved with 14 political campaigns. After volunteering for fifteen years, she was director of community services for the Cherry Hill Community Presbyterian Church from 1959 to 1969. There, she developed literacy, political education, and youth development programs, creating a state-funded daycare center for welfare recipients and job training program participants. Murphy mentored many Black women in Baltimore from childhood through college and beyond.
She was a charter commissioner on the governing board of the city of Baltimore's Anti-Poverty Program with Parren J. Mitchell. Murphy worked on the Community Action Commission from 1969 to 1972 and was a training officer in the Community Action Agency (the predecessor to the Urban Services Agency). She also coordinated a first-year sociology course at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, "Perspectives on Race", from 1970 to 1972.
Murphy was a commentator on local television and radio. She was a guest reporter on Black Point and Black News Conference on Baltimore's WJZ-TV. Murphy also wrote and broadcast a weekly commentary for the Morgan State University radio station WEAA. However, she was best known as a featured panelist on the WJZ-TV program Square Off from 1976 until 1986. As a print journalist, Murphy wrote an editorial column for the Friday edition of the Baltimore Afro-American Newspaper for twenty-one years and later for the Baltimore Times.
Murphy traveled extensively throughout the United States, North Africa, the Caribbean, China, and Europe and wrote numerous articles. In particular, she traveled to communist countries, including the former Soviet Union (Russia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan), East Germany, Cuba, and China in 1985. She was proud of defying U.S. government policies that discouraged and prohibited travel to these nations. She died of a heart attack while at home at the age of 84 on July 8, 2007.
