Madeline Wheeler Murphy

Madeline Wheeler Murphy (October 24, 1922 – July 8, 2007) was an African-American community activist, civil rights champion, advocate for the poor, and panelist on the Baltimore television show Square Off.

Madeline W. Murphy was born in Boston, October 24, 1922, and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. She was the second of three children of Arthur E. Wheeler, Sr., and Madeline (née Hall) Brooks.

She was educated in the Wilmington public schools and she graduated from Howard High School where she was 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 were married from 1942 until Judge Murphy's death in 2003. They lived in Delaware and Chicago briefly, before moving to the Baltimore area 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.

After having been a volunteer for fifteen years, she was appointed director of community services for the Cherry Hill Community Presbyterian Church, where she served from 1959 to 1969. In that position, she developed programs in literacy, political education, and youth development. The church served as a last resort for many Cherry Hill residents in need of food, clothing, counseling, job placement and was a location of community organizing around the issues facing welfare recipients and the lack of affordable housing. Under her leadership, this organizing led to the creation of a state-funded day care center in the church for welfare recipients and job training program participants.

Murphy served as a charter commissioner on the governing board of the city of Baltimore's Anti-Poverty Program (headed by Parren J. Mitchell), worked on the Community Action Commission, and from 1969 to 1972, became a training officer in the Community Action Agency (the predecessor to the Urban Services Agency). She also coordinated a freshman sociology course at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, called "Perspectives on Race", from 1970 to 1972.

Murphy was also a well-known public figure with a career as a commentator in local television and radio. She appeared as a regular guest host on the Larry Angelo Show in 1976, and she brought compelling black guests to the program. She served as a guest reporter on Black Point and Black News Conference with Wiley Daniels on Baltimore's WJZ-TV. Murphy also wrote and broadcast a weekly commentary for the Morgan State University radio station WEAA, on its program Impact News. However, she was best known as a feature panelist on the WJZ-TV program hosted by Richard Sher (newscaster), 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. The book entitled Madeline Murphy Speaks is a compilation of the best of these articles.

Murphy traveled extensively throughout the United States, North Africa, the Caribbean, China, and Europe, and wrote numerous articles on her travels. In particular, she traveled to many 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.