Frances L. Murphy II, 85; ex-publisher of black newspaper

Frances L. Murphy II, 85, publisher emeritus of the longest-running African American family-owned newspaper in the United States, died Wednesday of cancer-related illnesses at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore.

Murphy, known as Frankie Lou, followed in the footsteps of her grandfather, John H. Murphy Sr., a former slave and Civil War veteran who founded the Afro-American in Baltimore in 1892.

Her father, Carl Turley Murphy, was publisher from 1922 until his death in 1967. Murphy became publisher and chief executive of Afro-American Newspapers in 1971.

Murphy, the youngest of five girls, was born in Baltimore, and she grew up immersed in the family business. As a youngster, she and her sisters delivered the paper. Later, she spent her summers at various jobs at the newspaper plant and covered a succession of beats as a reporter, including crime, traditionally a male preserve.

She was city editor of the Baltimore Afro-American from 1954 to 1957.

She received an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1944, an undergraduate degree in education from Coppin State University in 1958 and a master’s degree in education from Johns Hopkins University in 1963.

She was publisher and chief executive of Afro-American Newspapers from 1971 to 1975, when she moved to Buffalo, where she was an associate professor and head of the journalism program at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

In 1984, she began teaching journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C.; two years later she became publisher of the Washington Afro-American, a sister publication. She taught at Howard until 1991.