Frances L. Murphy: Interview #1

Page 1

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

Ingersoll: What was it like growing up in a family that was focused on a newspaper? If that's not the way to put it, "a family focused on a newspaper," please change it.

Murphy: A family focused on a newspaper. I guess the earliest memory I would have would be the fact that we did a lot of reading. The dinner time was structured. The dinner was a structured meal. My earliest memory is that my mother [Vashti Turley Murphy] would read a story, "Up the Down Staircase," and that we were expected to pick out the main idea, we were expected to tell her what it meant and how it would affect our lives, and maybe what the lesson was. It was just a very quiet sort of thing.

I remember the early book reports. We didn't call them book reports. We were assigned to come to the dinner table with something that we had read, to talk about. She didn't call them book reports. She would just say, "Tonight is your night that you're going to discuss that." Remember now, I grew up in the days when there wasn't television, the early days, and the radio that was allowed, my memory is "Howdy Doody Time" and "Mert and Marge." When my father's car came into the driveway, even those were turned off. This was talking time, this was family time, this was discussion of grades and discussion of what you were going to do tomorrow. In the morning we would all have to be standing at the front door ready to move when my father [Carl James Greenbury Murphy] moved to go in town, because we lived in the suburbs.

Let me back up. Up until I was five, we lived in the city, which would normally be called the inner city now. Of course, at that time it was just the city.

Ingersoll: That was Baltimore.

Murphy: That was Baltimore, 1051 Myrtle Avenue. There was a lovely park in front of our house. In fact, I remember the people who lived on both sides, a doctor [Dr. Carper] and people who we remembered all our lives. It was a pretty close-knit neighborhood, a drugstore on the corner owned by Dr. T. Henderson Kerr, and there was a church across the way, Perkins Square. So it was a fairly close-knit neighborhood. I remember we had a big front yard. We would sit on the front steps and wait for my father to come home, and we had to be clean and starched. Boy, were we starched. I can think about the fact that when you sat down, the starch hurt you. It was really something.

I was the youngest of five girls, so therefore I was the one who couldn't go off the steps unless an older child went with me. I was the one who was always left behind when my other sisters went off to places. I was the one usually left at home with my mother and the housekeeper. So those were really nice days.

Page 3

expect you to know how to do things." Of course, he was a frequent visitor at the White House. They traveled all over the world and they expected us to be able to meet them in New York and be able to sit down at the hotel, wherever they were, and be able to know what to do without being told. So we learned that very, very early.

I can remember the lessons at the table. We used our silver every day. It was not anything. Good china and good silver, which I have today, was on the table every day. I sat beside my father. We had long silver knives, and if you put your elbows on the table, you would expect them to be cracked with the end of that long silver knife. So you learned very early to sit up straight. [Laughter.]

I guess the other thing in a big family is that you soon learn that "neither a borrower, nor a lender be." Despite the fact that there were five girls, my father would not allow us to borrow from each other. I've carried that through life. My children have never borrowed from me and I've never borrowed from a girlfriend. A lot of people do, but I don't. My father would say that that was just the cause for argument, that you each have a closet, you each have a room, and therefore unless it's handed down—of course everything was handed down to me, but he would say over and over again, "Unless it's handed down to you, don't you touch it."

My father liked the color blue. From the time I can remember, I had a blue chinchilla coat, and I can remember that he purchased everything for all the girls at one time. We did not shop in Baltimore because you could not try on clothes, you could not try on hats. So, therefore, my mother and father took us on twice-yearly trips to Philadelphia and New York to buy our clothes. Or they got them, I guess, maybe through a catalog or something. Anyhow, we had chinchilla coats. For as long as I can remember, because everybody had a chinchilla coat, my older sisters' coats were finally passed down to me, so I must have worn blue chinchilla coats for years. I remember that he also liked blue skirts and white blouses, so therefore my wardrobe consisted of many of those. [Laughter.]

So we had a large family, there were twin girls, the two oldest ahead of me were twins, and then the two older.

Ingersoll: What were their names, the two oldest?

Murphy: The oldest was Elizabeth Murphy Phillips Moss—that's her name now—but she was, of course, Elizabeth Murphy. Then there was Ida, named for my grandmother on my mother's side. Elizabeth and Ida were the oldest. Vashti and Carlita were the twins. Vashti was named for my mother, Carlita named for my father, whose name was Carl. Then, of course, I came along, named Frances Louise, named after my aunt, who was [Martha] Frances Louise Murphy, the first. She was the maiden aunt in the family.

Ingersoll: I noticed in some of the notes that came to you through the years, you were called Frankie. Was that a name that you got early on, or did that come later?

Murphy: Very, very early on. My father, going back to what I've been saying about boys. I imagine he wanted to call me Frank. My mother, in her soft-spoken way, I'm sure, must have objected, and it ended up Frankie. My aunt was always called Aunt Frank, so I became Frankie or, as my father would say, Frankie Lou, or Boy, one or the other. [Laughter.]

Ingersoll: Can we go back just a little ways and pick up on some of these things that you've told me that are so interesting? As I figured it out, am I right that your grandfather,

Page 5

was a slave, but she was freed and was able to buy the freedom of other sisters and brothers somewhere along the line.

Ingersoll: Your grandfather had been, too, hadn't he?

Murphy: Yes, my grandfather was a slave.

Ingersoll: Before he went to the war.

Murphy: Yes, that's right. Before he went to the Civil War. So he had been a slave. As I look back on it, I see my cousins and they say, "Oh, yeah, remember when we all used to go to Hattie Prather's?" Therefore, we spent the summer up there, so evidently as soon as school was over, they shipped us up to this farm, we stayed all summer, and then we came back home when school started.

It must have been around the time when I was either six or seven, one of my cousins [Houston Murphy] drowned or something during summer vacation. Then I think that next year, all of us went away to Camp Atwater, run by the Urban League, in East Brookfield, Massachusetts. I don't think we went back to the farm after that.

The other thing that I think we really get from the family is the fact that we all look alike. It's absolutely amazing to me when I look at a picture of my grandfather, look at my father, and look at the children and my grandchildren, the Murphy strain is very, very strong.

Ingersoll: Strong resemblance.

Murphy: A very strong resemblance. It's interesting to listen to cousins and first cousins, second cousins, third cousins. You ask the little child, "What is your name?" And the second name is Murphy. Everybody has the Murphy in his/her name if they're any way related to the family. Not everybody, but most of them do. We're a huge family, so huge now that I really don't know all the cousins and so forth.

Ingersoll: Why would you say they keep that name Murphy within their own name, no matter what other family they go into?

Murphy: I just think it's really interesting that even through the sixties when we had some who decided that, well, they didn't want to, the sixties, you know, were really a turnaround time when they didn't want to do it, some of them are going back and putting it back into their names.

Ingersoll: Since then?

Murphy: Since then. I have a little granddaughter, Andrea Draper, who is one of the few who doesn't, and she's now sixteen and she's saying, "Grandmother, please get my name changed so I can get Murphy put in. I'm the only one who doesn't have it."

Ingersoll: Isn't that interesting.

Page 7

Ingersoll: Tell me a little more about your mother. This name Vashti interests me very much because I've only heard it once before. Where does it come from?

Murphy: It comes from the Bible, Queen Vashti, who, like my mother, had a mind of her own.* When they told her that she was going to do something, she said very nicely that she wasn't. In those days, you know, women were told what to do by men, and she was one who insisted no.

Ingersoll: Maybe you or I could look it up and put it in the appendix.

Murphy: That was a lovely story, yes, and I've heard it so many times. I kind of remember where it comes from, but I'll have to look at the concordance and see where it came from.

Ingersoll: A strong-minded woman, soft-voiced woman. Did I read perhaps in one of the Mother's Day editorials or Mother's Day columns that your sister [Elizabeth "Bettye" Murphy (Phillips) (Moss)] wrote, that she was somebody who loved music very much?*

Murphy: Yes. Mother had a grand piano in the living room, which she loved to play. My earliest memories are of the family around the piano, singing. We all took piano lessons very early, and I can see Miss McAbee [Mrs. Ruth McAbee] now coming to the house, teaching us music. We took piano lessons year in and year out. Then when we got married and the children came along, my father sent all the children off to Peabody [Institute] for music. He said, "I don't care whether you learn to really play or not. You're going to learn how to read music, how to transpose music, and to appreciate good music." I think that's what he really wanted us to do—to appreciate good music.

In the house in the morning when my father got up, my father used to be, as I say, a German professor, and so therefore the operas were on—loud. That's the way you woke up in the morning. Daddy would get up in the morning and put his records on. Boy, you could hear them all over that big house. I'm sure the neighbors could, too. He would be singing in German, and Mama would join him in French. Boy, it was something. [Laughter.] But they loved good music and they enjoyed good music. I guess we got it by osmosis. It was just one of those expected things. I guess I was one of the children who really didn't pay too much attention to it, but I'd sing the melodies. He would read the stories of the operas and then he gave me a little book on the stories of the operas so I could understand what was going on. He got real disgusted when time came that they put it all in English. He didn't see any reason for that, because he said, "We'll never learn to communicate with other people if they don't teach us how to listen to the sounds." He believed very strongly that we needed to learn to listen to the sounds in the various languages.

So I guess the musical training came so that you could really hear people, and that's interesting, too, because Mother used to say that, too. We used to complain because she made us take Latin and French. I took Latin from the time I was in the seventh grade all the way through to the twelfth grade, and I took French from the tenth to the twelfth. Her reason for that insistence was the fact that we could hear things better, that you would pay more attention to it if you learned the language. Latin, of course, so that we'd know the roots of all the words and could define the words. She said, "You can't write unless you know what you're reading." So that was the reason for the Latin. That was interesting, as you said that to me. Things you don't think of.

______________________ * Vashti, Queen of Ahusuerus (Esther 1:9-2:17). *"I Remember Mama" in the "If You Ask Me" column in the Afro-American, 1970.

Page 9

Murphy: It might. One of my cousins, George B. Murphy [George Benjamin Murphy, Jr.], was very keen on the Russian people, and George B. was the editor of the Afro-American newspapers here in Washington back in the 1930s, 1936. My real memory of George B.—remember now, we have a huge family and George B. was older than I am. He's in my same generation, though, a first cousin. Back in '72 he insisted that I join a delegation going to the Soviet Union, and that's my really earliest memory of getting to know him well. He made all the arrangements for me to go, along with ten publishers of black newspapers. I was chairman of the board of the whole Afro chain at that time from '72 to about '74 or '75, and so I was a member of the delegation that went over. Everywhere we went, people were familiar with George B. Murphy, Jr. He's named for his father. A lot of places we went, people asked me about my cousin, so he had been a fighter in their movement for many years, obviously.

I think in later years he and my father may have been at odds, but I was not privy to the problems that may have come up at that time between the two of them. I do know that around about the fifties, when I was assigned to Washington to take over the paper for a little while, one of the things that my father wanted to do was to mute some of the things that George B. had done in the community. Not to get rid of them altogether, but show another face to the Afro. He wanted the Afro to get away from its editorial slant where it was. So I took over writing the editorials and so forth, with no background at all about communism and so forth, but strictly from the American point of view.

I've heard older Washingtonians talk about the leanings that George B. had toward the Soviet Union and how he felt that many things in the Soviet Union were a lot fairer than they were here in America. I understand that he worked very hard with Paul Robeson and so forth, people who were mistreated here in America and who fled to other countries in an effort to get fair treatment. So I have a fair understanding of some of that, but some of it I don't know.

Ingersoll: Then there came a time when your father was the German professor at Howard, I guess working part time with the Afro, even when he was a professor?

Murphy: When he was at Harvard College, he would do a lot of writing for my grandfather. Obviously he did some of the writing when he was away from Harvard. I have some of their letters back and forth between my grandfather and my father when he spent that year or so at Harvard. He graduated from Howard University, taught at Howard University for a while, then went on to Harvard to get his master's degree. So therefore during those periods at Harvard, he would see a lot of things. I remember one of his letters that made me feel so good. He talked about the chimes that he could hear in the morning when he woke up. About his room on the Harvard Yard, the fact that it was cold and he needed more money for coal, he didn't realize it was going to be that cold up there, and the fact that it was so beautiful walking out in the morning among the trees and things like that. Then he would write about the people who came to talk at Harvard, Norman Vincent Peale and these people. He was writing about these. These were the kinds of things that he would write to my grandfather about during his years at Harvard. Of course, he wrote about the people in his class and what they were doing. I have a whole scrapbook.

Ingersoll: It sounds as though there was a very close relationship between father and son.

Murphy: It sounded from the letters that he wrote to my grandfather and my grandfather wrote him right back. Remember now, my father only had a small stipend to go to Harvard. My memory is that his sisters and brothers and my grandfather helped him to get through Harvard. That was the only way. In fact, when he went to Europe, when he went to Germany to study,

Page 11

Murphy: Yes. My father was teaching at Howard University. Of course, my uncles had already come back and helped my grandfather. The one you heard me mention a few minutes ago, George B. Murphy, was principal of a school, because he was principal of the school that I went to as a little child. So they were teaching in Baltimore and my dad was over in Washington, D.C., and living in Washington, D.C.

When my grandfather got up to, I guess maybe 1918, so three or four years before his death, he was very concerned about his health, so he asked my father to come home to Baltimore. My father thought about it, talked it over with my mother. My mother owned her house over here in Washington, because she had purchased it while she was teaching school. So she sold her home and they left Washington and bought the house on Myrtle Avenue and moved to Baltimore.

It's interesting, in some of the love letters I have, my mother's and father's love letters, on one of her birthdays or something he gives her a diamond, "In exchange for the money you loaned me to buy the house." Their love letters are just gorgeous. I have some of those. They're just beautiful.

Ingersoll: Oh, what a treasure.

Murphy: Back and forth from the time that he began to court her up until the time they were married. In one of the letters, he writes that he courted her for a year before they got married. The letters back and forth are just beautiful.

Ingersoll: What a treasure to have those.

Murphy: They're lovely.

Ingersoll: Have you ever seen a letter or anything like that—and this is something that Ferrar says—that your father, Carl, said that he would go and "help Pa and the boys"?

Murphy: That's the way they used to talk. They talked about Pa and the boys. In many of his writings, it's "Dear Pa." They called my father Pat or "Dear Carl," or "Dear Pat." But it's to Pa. Most of the letters I have, he writes, "Dear Pa."

Ingersoll: I thought just that phrase, "going to help Pa and the boys" made it such a family kind of work.

Murphy: Not to my memory, but the phrase sounds like the way he talked.

Ingersoll: Another thing that Ferrar says is that your father was quite forceful and could even be quite iron-fisted—in terms of the newspaper after he became editor, I guess he's [Ferrar] probably thinking.

Murphy: That is an understatement. My father was a short man, 5'2", but there were very few people who would cross him. He had a way of turning on you, and in no time at all you would understand that you'd better get out of his way. Or else! My father took very little off of anyone. It didn't make any difference who it was. It was frightening at times, because you heard me say that we lived in this big house with this gorgeous lawn around us that we so well kept, that my father kept so beautifully, and our neighbors were all white. So therefore I can hear him saying right now, "Those people behind me ought to do something," and he'd go out and tell them.

Page 13

or, "I didn't hear that." He would also let you sit and talk as if he knew nothing at all. They called him Mr. Carl. They'd go in to see Mr. Carl and they'd say, "I'm going to tell Mr. Carl this." He could have heard it ten times before, but he never let on that he had heard it. So therefore you found yourself explaining over and over again the minor details, and then when he got ready to use that information, he made you look silly. He had such a tremendous mind.

My young son, who is an orthopedic surgeon, Jimmy Wood [James Edward Wood, Jr.], in California, I think he's got his grandfather's mind, too. He must have had a photographic mind. My dad would read those Supreme Court briefs and sit down with Thurgood Marshall and those lawyers and talk, and you'd listen to the conversation and you'd say to yourself, "Oh, my goodness gracious." He had read all the law. He could cite the law. "The law says here," and, "It says this here." I can hear the arguments now, about separate but equal and so forth. I was privileged to be able to sit there and listen.

Always, as I look back on my father, I just think how wonderful he was to me during my mother's last illness. He read all my books when I did my master's at Hopkins. We would talk on the phone half the night, about what they said. Johns Hopkins gave four-hour comprehensive examinations, you know, and they would ask you to give the train of thought of a book. Of course, my father very easily had picked up the train of thought already, you know. Milton, Shakespeare came easy with my dad. He made you see them. He'd recite that old English language and then he'd translate it into [modern] English.

Ingersoll: Of course, it was fairly close to the German.

Murphy: Oh, yes. It was so easy for him. As I look back on it now, you're talking about my father and the way he handled people, it was just absolutely amazing to me how he could just take things and make them so simple and just turn those words around. Then you sat there, and he would pound the desk. "Do you understand what I'm saying?" What else are you going to say but, "Yes"? [Laughter.] You knew he was in complete charge, and it didn't matter whether the governor was sitting there at the breakfast table or the mayor or the president of the United States. I can see John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. My father made his point, he made it very, very clear, and that was it, and you couldn't say that you didn't know. I think the thing that I wish I had been privy to was to have seen the two of them, John Kennedy, who I understand was extremely brilliant, and my dad together. I knew they had many a meeting together. I would have loved to have seen the two of them go head to toe.

Ingersoll: Was this the same kind of reasoning, argument, assurity, that he used with his daughter as well as with his compatriots?

Murphy: Yes. I guess I was one of the last ones home. Everybody else had gone away to school. What he would say many times was, "This is the way you've got to handle that situation. Let me show you how to handle this one." Or, "Come on, let's go here. I'm going to an NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] meeting tonight and I want you to listen to this." Or, "I'm going up to the NAACP board meeting and I want you to listen."

Ingersoll: He'd take you with him.

Murphy: Oh, yes. He took me with him to New York and so forth. "I want you to sit and listen to this one. Listen to these people who are running their mouths and don't know what they're talking about. Then listen to how you are going to have to put the information in so they'll understand without them getting upset with you."

Page 15

Murphy: Oh, definitely! I think what it taught us very, very early was no matter what people said, there were a whole lot of intelligent women in this country. Mama talked all over the country to the Delta chapters. Of course, being a co-founder, she was invited.

Ingersoll: She traveled?

Murphy: Traveled, invited everywhere to speak. Now and then she'd take us with her. Mama founded two important things that I remember. One was Delta Sigma Theta, which, of course, went nationwide. The other was a study club in Baltimore called the Philomathians. I'm president right now of the Philomathians. She established that in 1932. That is a study group. We come together once a month and have speakers and talk about national and local issues. This is the way the club was founded.

Ingersoll: What is that name, Philomathians?

Murphy: It means "lovers of learning." So those are the two. There are a lot of other organizations, of course, that she was very active in and she helped establish and so forth, but I think those are the two that had the most impact on our lives.

Ingersoll: Would you go to the Philomathians as a young girl growing up?

Murphy: Oh, yes. Not as a young girl growing up. Mother took us to the Women's Junior Civic League as young children growing up so that we would learn how to organize clubs. Our parents were right there and they helped us. We had teas. You know, the usual things that you have. But I did not come into the Philomathians until I was a college graduate. I didn't go into Delta until I was a sophomore in college. That's the time you generally pledge, when you're a sophomore in college.

Ingersoll: Did your mother have very much to do with the newspaper at all?

Murphy: My mother would discuss with my dad the things she'd read. I think she had something to do in her own way of changing his mind about things, how he would see things. Oh, they would talk about editorials and books and things. They were so widely read that he would come home and bounce things off on her. But there were two things that she just could not take. She hated to be photographed, because she said she wasn't photogenic. She said every time the Afro camera focused on her, she didn't come out right.

Ingersoll: And there's that beautiful picture of her in the sorority book.

Murphy: As I look around the room at her in the pictures that are here on the wall, the family and so forth, she said she never looked right.

The only other thing that I do know that I can hear her saying to him is we got numerous invitations, as you must know, at the house. Everybody invited them to everything. I could hear her saying, "Carl, don't take that invitation to the office before I have a chance to respond to it." He would take it to the office and give it to the social writer and tell her that he wanted this written up. My father did not particularly like to go to social events. Every now and then he would go with her. Then I knew my mother had worked on him for weeks. Finally, in desperation, he'd throw up his hands and say, "Okay, Vashti, I'll go." She'd throw up her hands when she came back and say, "I can't get him to come home. He danced and he had a good time and he talked to everybody, and I can't get him to come home."

Page 17

Murphy: Every night and morning. Washed out my underwear and so forth and so on. In those days you didn't have nylon like you have today. You had to iron those slips and so forth before you could wear them, and had to iron that blouse. So I'm sure it must have been a dark blue skirt that he left me. I can't conceive of it being anything else.

Ingersoll: What about your aunts and uncles who worked on the paper, many of them? What kind of influences did they have on you? Maybe we can start with your Aunt Frank, for whom you were named.

Murphy: Aunt Frank [(Martha) Frances Louise Murphy] was a spinster, as you heard me say. She was a maiden aunt. From Aunt Frank I learned to keep on my gloves and wear my hat and walk like a lady on the street. I didn't just learn that from Aunt Frank, but she impressed it on me. Aunt Frank had a Model T Ford. I was walking with my girlfriends one afternoon, and she stopped that Model T Ford in the middle of the street, got out, and said, "Young lady, where are your gloves?" People say to me today, "Why do you wear gloves all the time?" But I can see her doing that.

Aunt Frank liked to play golf. She tried her best to teach me golf. I think she finally gave up on that. She was a schoolteacher and she directed the Clean Block Campaign. The Afro had a Clean Block Campaign. It was her idea to start it back there in the early thirties, and she directed it every single summer.

Ingersoll: What did that mean?

Murphy: That meant that around about April and May, she sent out letters to all the public schools. Remember now, she was a teacher, a professor at Coppin State Teachers College, where she was teaching teachers. So, therefore, many of them she had taught. She would either send out letters or, I guess, call them. I'm sure she sent out letters in those days, and said to them that she wanted them to organize their children in their classrooms to get prepared for what she would call proper activity for the summer. Proper activity for the summer was that they would join the Afro Clean Block Campaign. Every morning they would get up and they'd sweep their streets and pick up the trash and wash their marble steps. By afternoon, they would be sitting down like ladies and gentlemen in their blocks, in clean clothes. So, therefore, Aunt Frank organized all these children, 10,000 of them, every summer, and she went out and raised the money for people to give them prizes.

Ingersoll: I think I remember seeing some kind of a certificate.

Murphy: That's it.

Ingersoll: Young Frances Murphy, yourself, had received one as a successful participant.

Murphy: In the Clean Block Campaign. She did this for summer after summer. Then when she got where she thought that she couldn't handle it by herself, who would be the natural person that she would want to direct the campaign? Me. So she very politely told my father it's time that I worked with her during the summer.

Ingersoll: At what point did you come into that responsibility?

Murphy: I must have been just out of college. Maybe it was in high school, just out of college. I don't remember. One or the other. I was awfully young. Aunt Frank, therefore, took me with her as we went around to visit all these people. When she came into the blocks, the children just

Page 19

purchased a home way back there in the late forties, and all of those houses were owned by the children of people who lived there.

Ingersoll: They've just continued generation after generation.

Murphy: It's remained a solid block. The people have known each other all their lives, so it's really interesting. A lot of blocks in Baltimore are just like that, that were originally organized as clean blocks with block captains who get everybody together to do things and are now still doing things together. It's really interesting.

Ingersoll: And you've continued that, your part in it, in one way or another, from the time you left college.

Murphy: Yes, and it's interesting. August 13th, which is the birthday of the Afro-American newspapers, is also the date that's always been used as a parade down to the Clean Block Campaign closing, so we've always celebrated the birthday of the Afro-American along with the closing of the Clean Block Campaign.

Ingersoll: In Baltimore?

Murphy: Yes.

Ingersoll: Does that happen in Washington?

Murphy: It did this year and it did last year, too, but I think the last two years are the first times we've had it in Washington for a good ten or fifteen years. But it wasn't easy.

Ingersoll: There's also a Richmond edition, isn't there?

Murphy: Yes, in Richmond.

Ingersoll: Do they do the Clean Block Campaign there?

Murphy: Not like that. Richmond also has a Clean Block Campaign, the city does, and I think the Afro helps.

Ingersoll: They work together at that point.

Murphy: Yes.

Ingersoll: When you were growing up, did you have any daydreams, as a young girl, about what you would do with your life?

Murphy: I guess maybe when I graduated from high school I said I wanted to be a journalist, and I think young people today understand this, but it wasn't what I wanted to do, it was what we were going to do, as arranged by my mother and father. My mother and father looked at the college catalog and they said, "You will take so and so and so and so." You took them. Then the grades came in, you sent home the schedule, and they sent it back to you and said, "This is what you're going to take this semester." So for the five of us, it wasn't a matter of choice. We took in high school the programs arranged by my parents, and we took in college the programs arranged.

Page 21

Ingersoll: This was a circle that was black people, Afro-Americans, who were surrounded by white people.

Murphy: Yes. So I would deliver my papers and collect for my papers, sometimes with him along. When he went along it was just great, because we talked to everybody. As my mother would say, it would take us forever to deliver the papers, but we had a good time because he would, as I say, sing and talk, and people would come out and bring him stuff. "Why don't you put this in the paper?" You could imagine. One of our neighbors was W.E.B. DuBois and the college professors and the president of the college. Those were the days when the professors on the campus were beginning to move off the campus. A lot of them built their homes there, the Dr. O'Connells and so forth, the Dr. T. I. Browns, the Dr. [Joshua] Maxwells. These were professors at Morgan in those days. Dr. [Clarence] Monroe. I can just think of the professors who had homes there, who had built their homes. The guy who was head of the music department at Douglass High School, Lwelleyn Wilson, was there. So in this area were people whom he wanted to talk with.

My dad was chairman of the board of trustees at Morgan State College, so therefore for a whole lot of these people, of course, he was legally their boss. When Dad would walk with me, everybody was coming out of the house. "Hi, Mr. Carl!" "Hi, Dr. Carl!" That was nice. I would just deliver my papers, throw them up on the porches, and go back and collect. That was some of the other things that we did.

Mother walked with me sometimes. When Mother walked with me sometimes, I knew somewhere along the line someone would call, "Miss Vash, come on and play bridge," and I would lose my companion. [Laughter.] But she would walk every now and then with me, but I knew for sure it wouldn't be too long before somebody would say, "Come on. I need one more for bridge." Or, "We're going to play pokeno."

Ingersoll: Looking at your school days, I think I know the names of your junior high school and high school, but I don't know the name of your elementary school. What was that?

Murphy: I went to two elementary schools. I started out at School 112. They had numbers in those days. My uncle, George B. Murphy, was the principal at School 112. When we moved to Morgan Park, my dad transferred us to East Baltimore schools because actually we were in East Baltimore, so it was easier to come straight down Hartford Road to School 101. We had to pass all these white schools to get to this school.

My memory of 101 is that there was a big guy there named [Howard] Gross, who had a huge voice and would get out in the yard with a bullhorn.

Ingersoll: Was he a teacher?

Murphy: He was the principal. I can see us now, lining up in the yard getting ready to go into the school building. I enjoyed school because school was easy to me.

Ingersoll: Your report cards, which you saved, and I took a look at, were all excellent. A few dropped to "good" from time to time.

Murphy: School was too easy for me. Dad and Mother knew school was too easy for me, and that's why he made me read so much. He knew that I'd do my work and then I needed something else to do. Therefore, they pushed me—Girl Scouts, choir, this, that, music lessons, dance lessons.

Page 23

Ingersoll: Do you remember any particular books, any particular reading that you really remember because it had a special meaning or influence on you?

Murphy: Oh, boy. It's a funny thing that you would say that. What disturbed me—and I guess I shouldn't say it, but what disturbed me, I was an avid reader of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and I was an avid reader of a series of books called Up One Pair of Stairs. Those were lovely little books with stories in them. What used to make me so mad, there weren't any black people in there. Of course, I would complain bitterly about that to my dad.

Ingersoll: What was his response to that?

Murphy: The response that Dad gave me was that he began to bring the books that he had in the Afro home and put them on the shelf and encouraged us to read them, and that's what we began to do. Very, very early, I guess my sister Ida did it more than I did, but we began to read, as we say today, at the library.

Very, very early I remember the [J.A.] Rogers series books, Sex and Race. I think those series of books on blacks in white America made a tremendous impact on me. Here was a man who in those days was writing about presidents who had black blood in them or women who were black and living in the White House. Those books really made an impression on me. There was a long series of them. This gentleman had written these books about the way blacks had been treated in America.

A lot of the things that I read were biographies of people who had done things. I did a lot of reading along those lines. Up From Slavery, the DuBois writings, of course we read. J. Saunders Reddings had done a lot of writing for the Afro, and, of course, we read his things. We went back and we would read Ph.D. theses done by graduate students, doctoral students at Howard. So there was a lot of different kinds of things that we read.

I guess maybe when we got really interested in reading and began to talk about it, he made sure that we had the kinds of books that we needed to have to read. They gave me a better perspective on life, and maybe that's why I felt so good about different things, because very early I read Mary Church Terrell and her writings. I read things that Mary McLeod Bethune had written. So I had a deep appreciation of how these people had struggled and what they were able to do. I guess maybe those would be the best. Of course, in later life I've done a lot of reading of different other people, but I think maybe that was the first.

The first assignment I got in high school or junior high school, I don't remember which, where I had to do an assignment, I must have done the whole encyclopedia in a couple of weeks, and that's when I think I complained bitterly to my dad that I couldn't find any blacks. That's evidently when I started doing the other reading. I do recall early that we had books around the house that we read at the dinner table and so forth, and they must have been some of the books, too, that Dad had brought home. He had gobs of books that he brought home. His library was just outstanding.

Ingersoll: Let me put on another tape.

[End Tape 1, Side B; Begin Tape 2, Side A]

Ingersoll: I remember seeing in your treasures, your memoirs, a little card. I think it was yellow with green writing, or yellow with red writing, that said that "Frances Murphy is a member of the

Page 25

and Dad, who came. We had the football games. We were in the band. So it was just one of the things which we were just so busy with in that community. Very seldom did we go out of our community to do anything. We went away, of course, because we went away to camp and those places, or I followed my parents.

Ingersoll: Were your camps segregated or were they integrated?

Murphy: Segregated. We went to Camp Atwater in East Brookfield, Massachusetts, where the train came out of the South, picked up people coming up from the South from Florida, stopped here in Washington, stopped in Baltimore, stopped in Philadelphia, stopped in New York. We changed trains and went on off to East Brookfield, Massachusetts,or we went by bus or our parents drove up. Many a year my parents drove up. The boys went through the month of July, the girls went through the month of August.

Ingersoll: How could they do that? Someone must have sponsored it.

Murphy: It was sponsored by the Urban League of Springfield. The prices, of course, through the years went up. From the time I was eight till I was sixteen, I went away to East Brookfield, Massachusetts. We met there at that camp the women and the men today who, of course, are in the top positions across the country. We knew those whose parents could afford to send them had to be people who were professional people and who were in the same kinds of jobs my parents were. But in the early days, my parents had all five of us at Camp Atwater and we spent the whole month of August there. That was the time my parents would travel while we were away at camp. They sent us away to camp or they drove us off to camp, and off they went. It was just absolutely amazing.

I was looking back day before yesterday at some of the camp programs, and it was just absolutely marvelous, the names of the people who I can recognize today. Two or three of the young women I went to camp with as a young child also went to the University of Wisconsin with me. They came out of Philadelphia. Philadelphia had what was called in those days Girls' High. I guess it still does today. It was one of the top schools in Philadelphia. We met them at Camp Atwater. Both girls (Evelyn Bowden and Mary Hinkson) were daughters of doctors, and I met them again at the University of Wisconsin when I was a freshman there. So it was just absolutely amazing. Camp was just something.

So what I'm saying is that we had our own of everything. From the time I could wake up in the morning until I went to bed at night, I was taught or handled by well-educated black people who had everything of their own. From the pharmacist on the corner, as you heard me say, to the minister, to my teachers, everything was segregated. We didn't know any better and it didn't make any difference to us. We thought we were well educated, and we were.

When I got ready to go away to the University of Wisconsin, I can see my English teacher sitting down with me, tutoring me that summer to make sure that there wasn't anything that I had missed. She spent the summer with me. I wish I could remember her name, because she was just so wonderful.

Ingersoll: That wasn't, by any chance, Josie Goodrich Stevens, was it?

Murphy: Yes!

Page 27

Murphy: No. Blood sisters. She taught me in junior high school. She was my home room teacher. In those days, you must remember, you could not wear makeup. If you were looking too hard at a young man or you were seen doing something, you were corrected right away. I don't know what I must have done to upset Miss Hermione that day, but I can remember feeling the sting of her hand across my face. Of course, before I got home, she had already called my mother. Miss Hermione and my mother were very good friends. Of course, when I got home, Mother said I'd already been punished and that was enough for me, because she had never hit me. So that was the end of that, whatever I had done. I don't remember what it was.

Their mother, Pauline Wharton (also a Pauline), taught me music in junior high school. That's where I learned that I had to sit up straight. Dunbar Junior High School was brand new. The music room was just like a concert hall, where the seats were in a semi-circle and the high grand piano was at the front, and the bandstand was in the back. Miss Pauline would walk behind you on those rows, and if you weren't sitting up straight, she'd put her hand in your back and tell you to sit up straight. She was the one who put on those gorgeous operettas, beautiful operettas. We enjoyed it. Everybody wanted to be in her choir. Oh, choir was just wonderful. We loved choir. Everybody went to choir.

Ingersoll: Were you in any of those operettas?

Murphy: Oh, yes. Oh, yes! You know, you had to be in the operetta! Oh, yes. Right on the front row.

Then the other daughter, Constance Wharton, taught me art. She was just wonderful. She was great. They were all Wharton in those days. Miss Hermione never married, but Constance Wharton married. Young Pauline married. Miss Hermione Wharton went on to become principal. She came up through the ranks, became principal of one of the senior high schools, and she was my daughter's [Frances] principal.

Ingersoll: Oh, how nice.

Murphy: At the senior high school. So those are the teachers who I can remember. There was another teacher, a little short teacher named Lottie O. Chase. Miss Lottie O. Chase was another of my Dunbar Junior High School teachers who I'll long remember. She was wonderful. We had a lot of excellent teachers, teachers who cared a lot about you, who made it a joy to learn. It was just lovely to learn in those days. I hear children talking about how they don't want to go to school or the parents say the children don't do their work. They didn't have any trouble with us.

Ingersoll: Hard to understand that, isn't it?

Murphy: We had excellent teachers. They cared about us. They knew our parents, too. Then there's the other thing. These were women or men who were in clubs with my mother and who went to church with us and so forth. We knew them. We knew them well. They knew us well. I was valedictorian of my junior high school class.

Ingersoll: I noticed that there was an article that said, "Frances Louise Murphy leads the class in scholarship." That was 1937. There was a picture of quite a few of the outstanding students, but you were the one who had led in scholarship.

At Dunbar there was a publication called the Dunbar Broadcast, wasn't there?

Page 29

We learned to handle guns very well. My dad slept with a gun underneath his pillow, and so guns were just accepted in those days. We didn't play with them. We were taught early how to handle them. You knew how to cock, you knew how to shoot, and there wasn't anything to be afraid of. Nothing you would really play with.

Ingersoll: You were on the Student Court, I noticed. What did that mean?

Murphy: We had a student bill of rights, and when there was an infraction of the rules, it came before the Student Court first. There were certain things that came before the Student Court, which you were to rule on one way or the other. I don't remember what the cutoff was, but I can imagine that most of the things were not the serious infractions that we think of today. I imagine it could have been just like us cutting school that day. That would have gone before the Student Court. Or it could have been an argument between the Student Council or something that the Student Court was allowed to, but that was a regular court with the teachers as sponsors, where you did it exactly as a courtroom would go, with lawyers and everything. I imagine some of the young legislators today, like former Congressman Parren Mitchell or some of those were some of those who really worked out of the Student Court.

Ingersoll: He was one of the people who went to your school?

Murphy: You must remember now I said to you there were only two high schools in those days. My class that went into Dunbar Senior High School was the first senior high school class over in East Baltimore. I went to Dunbar Junior High School, but didn't continue into the senior high school. I didn't continue because I had to go to college. My father was afraid they would not be accredited by the time I got to college, because accreditation in those days, as today, was based on the number of successful graduates you had. So we transferred uptown to Northwest Baltimore to Douglass Senior High, which was the one that had been there for years. Therefore, Douglass Senior High School had everybody who wasn't in Dunbar. So anybody who went to high school, we knew. Anybody who became a teacher out of Baltimore, anybody who went to law school, became a doctor and so forth, who came along with you, you knew, because those were the only two high schools.

Ingersoll: I was here before, looking at your scrapbooks, and I mentioned to you that I had looked at the yearbook from Douglass, and the wonderful things all those young people were looking forward to doing. I remember your response was, "Yes, and they did it." Then you explained some very interesting things to me about the situation in Maryland in those days. Could you put that on the tape for us, please?

Murphy: Sure. Before I came out of high school, Parren Mitchell, who later became a congressman, had applied for the University of Maryland, and the University of Maryland had refused to let them come in even as undergraduates. So, therefore, the governor—and I don't remember which governor it was at that time—but the governor and my dad got together. My father said, "If you're not going to let them go to the University of Maryland, then Maryland citizens ought to pay for them to go someplace else." So the agreement between the governor and my father was, "Okay. I'll give you so much money and, therefore, you be chairman of a scholarship commission." There was only one criteria, that if you couldn't get a course at Morgan State College and that course was offered at the University of Maryland, then you were entitled to room, board, and tuition at any college you wanted to go to.

Therefore, my father sent three of us to the University of Wisconsin, room, board, tuition, two travels home each semester, my other sister to the University of Minnesota, on the state of

Page 31

about "that Curly Byrd, who tells me that he wants no Negroes and coloreds in the University of Maryland, and yet he still can't get these professors to do what he wants them to do, or he can't get his board to do what he wants them to do. Getting all this money from the state." I can hear my dad talking about the new stadiums they're going to have and everything, and we couldn't study there.

Ingersoll: So your father would help other young black students to find the right place.

Murphy: That's right. He was chairman of the commission.

Ingersoll: In things other than journalism?

Murphy: Yes. Oh, yes. It depends on what they wanted to do.

Ingersoll: He would help them find the right place in California or wherever.

Murphy: And I have to be very frank with you. Dad would say to you, if you came before him, "If you want to be so and so, find one course that you want to take that Morgan doesn't offer, so I can give you a scholarship."

Ingersoll: Wonderful!

Murphy: He wanted some of them to come to Morgan. A lot of them came to Morgan, but there were a lot of them who were going on to professional schools so he wanted to make sure that they had everything that that professional school said you were supposed to have. So, therefore, if you were going to a certain school and you didn't have that course at Morgan, he wanted to make sure you had it. So he would say to them, "Wait a minute. Have you looked at the graduate school? Do you know what they're going to require you to have? If you haven't done it, you go back and get the graduate school catalog." He said, "Let's look and see what you have to have in graduate school. Let's see. Does Morgan have all that?" Or he'd say to them, "You're going to Morgan for this one year (or these two years) because you can do all that, but then you've got to have a scholarship so you can go off to so and so and get the rest of it."

Ingersoll: What was your experience at the University of Wisconsin like?

Murphy: Interesting. Extremely interesting. In my freshman year, there were six black women and thirty-six fellows. And being the woman that I was, we set up a system where they could draw straws of who they would date. I was in the dormitory. My sister's room was right next to mine. My father didn't believe, as you heard me say earlier, of us rooming together or borrowing from each other. So they tried to put us together. I can appreciate that as I look back, but my father said, "No. My daughters have to have two single rooms because they're used to being apart." So our rooms were right next to each other. My sister was, of course, very protective of me.

My first year of college I had a ball. I went just wild. After, I guess, the first couple of months, my father cut off my allowance, told me to settle down and go to work. I had a good time. I ran back and forth to Chicago. I don't think I studied at all. I did the minimum or whatever. My father got those first group of grades and had a heart attack.

Ingersoll: Knowing what you could do.

Page 33

Then the world changed. We went to war. When we went to war, they put us out of the dormitories and here came the soldiers.

Ingersoll: That must have been your sophomore year?

Murphy: Pearl Harbor, my sophomore year, 1941. December '41. They put us out of Barnard Hall and put us over in Chadburne Hall the next year, which was an older dormitory, and the men took over. I must have been assigned to Chadburne Hall that next year. Finally they took us off campus altogether because the sailors came in and took over all the dorms.

But with the war came all these black soldiers. [Laughter.] Oh, that was something! Here we were, just a few of these black women on campus. You talk about somebody running and hiding! And most of them were officers. They had officers' training in those days. So where we had been dealing with our own peers and people who we knew, who were students in the school and so forth, here came all these guys who were in officers' training. So, therefore, when you went to dances and so forth, they were all there, too. It was an interesting senior year. A very, very interesting senior year.

Ingersoll: It would have been for a longer time than just your senior year.

Murphy: Junior and senior year. We went out, but not as much as we used to. I think we sort of pulled together then and just decided, "We'd better date in groups." Because most of the men that we knew had gone, had been drafted by that time, and then there were just so many soldiers there in town. I do remember going to some of the things my senior year.

I guess what really strikes my mind, it must have been in my sophomore year. As you know, they have rushes on campus. Because we were here at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from Baltimore, Maryland, it was assumed that we were fairly rich, from a fairly rich family, so we got rushed by all the sororities until the word got around that we were black. So the first rush we went to, we laughed about it as we did it, because we knew good and well they didn't know that we were black.

Ingersoll: Would this be because they were just going by lists of names?

Murphy: Yes. Grade point and list of names. So we got a rush letter. We talked it over with my parents, and my parents said, "Go! You're not going to pledge anyhow because you're going Delta." And we came back and told them. I can hear my mother chuckling now. She had a way of chuckling. She said, "Well, that's an experience for you."

Ingersoll: And she wanted you to have that experience?

Murphy: Yes. She said, "You girls have never been buffed before," as she would call it. She would say, "You need to really come out and understand how prejudiced the world is."

Ingersoll: That's interesting. You'd been protected.

Murphy: We'd been protected, and every place we went, everybody knew us. So she said, "Oh, go."

Ingersoll: "Buffed" was from rebuffed.

Page 35

by the Alpha Nu chapter. My sister Bettye was made right at Howard before going to the University of Minnesota.

Ingersoll: It would be nice to put a Xerox of that picture in the appendix of this with your mother's very nice picture at the top.

Murphy: Yes, with us and the grandchildren.

[End Tape 2, Side A; Begin Tape 2, Side B]

Ingersoll: What about the journalism school at Wisconsin? How was that for you?

Murphy: Journalism school was okay. In many of my classes I was the only black. But you have to remember that I followed two sisters. When you get to the journalism school itself, it was a small school. There weren't that many people in each class. It was headed by Dr. Grant Hyde. He knew my dad. Dad had been out to school by the time I came along. My sister Ida had made a tremendous record there. My sister Carlita came behind her and she sailed on through, you know. Here I came. You'd say something to me and I'd say, "Uh-huh." You know. Big deal. I guess Dr. Hyde just never could understand me at all. I wouldn't get upset. My sister Ida would get upset about things and she'd lay Dr. Hyde, I'm sure, out. My sister Carlita, of course, was just one of these quiet, bright readers who just did everything right, and still does today. She does everything right.

And I came along at Wisconsin and I did my assignments and I worked on the Wisconsin State Journal and they pushed me to work on the Daily Cardinal. I think I may have worked a little bit there on the Daily Cardinal. I don't remember being too excited about the Daily Cardinal. It didn't hit me as anything I was really interested in doing. I went to class, I did my work, I did my papers. As you heard me say, I got my As and my Bs, mostly Bs. I don't recall putting too much effort into what I did because I wasn't enjoying doing it. I learned what I had to learn, came home and worked in the summer at the Afro, which I enjoyed.

Ingersoll: Were any of the classes particularly useful, do you think, for your future career?

Murphy: None that I can think of. I learned at the Afro. I may have expressed that opinion to my father many times, but he said, "Get the degree. You'll need it."

Ingersoll: Very practical.

Murphy: Yes. "You'll need the degree." So I think my grades reflected the fact that I may have gotten all Bs instead of As, which I could have gotten if I'd applied myself.

Ingersoll: Was there a chapter of Sigma Delta Chi [Society of Professional Journalists] at Wisconsin?

Murphy: Yes, but they didn't want me and I didn't apply.

Page 37

So from the time I can remember, I had a bank account. Therefore, you were always told to pay yourself first, so I always saved part of my salary. I just do it automatically. I don't even think about it. It's just a matter of course that whatever I get, part of it's going into the bank and the rest of it is mine. But I have always paid myself first. Having three children to raise and being a divorcée, it's been my lifesaver, because I've been able to put my kids through college, all three of them. The last one who went through, she went strictly on savings and salary, so it's just been what we were taught to do very, very early. He didn't believe in spending everything you had, and he didn't care what it was. That paid off.

Ingersoll: Those summers, which were also summers that were during the war, were those summers when the Mosquito Patrol that you mentioned to me went to work together?

Murphy: Yes, that was the time. By the time I got out of college, that was '44. The war had been going on for a couple of years and there were very few men left. So we came in on that Afro copy desk. I can remember one of my high school classmates who had been my very good friend also joined us. Maethelda Morris, her name was then. She joined us. She was a reporter. My sister Bettye was there, my cousin Elizabeth [Murphy Oliver]. We became just the Mosquito Patrol. We did a lot of volunteer work and we worked at the Afro. Those were—I hate to say good years, but they were. They were very fun years. We worked in the USO and did all the different things that everybody else was doing during the war.

Ingersoll: How did you get that name, Mosquito Patrol?

Murphy: I don't know who gave it that name, talking about the little mosquitos up there. We were all little people. We didn't weigh but so much. I don't know who gave us the name of Mosquito Patrol, but they sure did. That really went on a good year or so before the war ended and the men started coming home.

Ingersoll: So the Mosquito Patrol was really a group of relatives, women?

Murphy: No, a group of reporters, not necessarily relatives. My memory is there were four or five of us. One of my high school classmates, Maethelda, was among the Mosquito Patrol. One of my classmates from Wisconsin was a member, Audrey Weaver, who came back to us to Baltimore after graduating from Wisconsin. I don't remember whether my sister—I'm sure Carlita must have been there. No, no, Carlita married during the war and went to Buffalo.

I'm trying to think who else was on that city desk at that time. This was the editorial department at that time, because all the men had gone. They'd all been sent either overseas by the Afro as war correspondents, like my sister Bettye was sent overseas to England, or they were drafted in the army or the navy or the marines.

Ingersoll: So you were a rather tight group who worked to get the newspaper out, as well as doing some of these other things like USO together.

Murphy: Yes, we did a lot of things with the USO. We did a lot of things at Provident Hospital. I was a nurse's aide at Provident Hospital during those days. We had taken the course, because the hospital was so short-handed. Many of us worked at the hospital after we left the Afro at night.

Ingersoll: Maybe we should leave it at this point and then when we meet again we can go on to the years afterwards with your journalism work and your teaching.