Community Work
As a freelance writer, community organizer and activist, Mrs. Murphy was devoted social, racial and economic justice through her use of the written word and via various forms of civic engagement. During her sixty years in Baltimore, she participated in numerous community organizations. As a resident of Cherry Hill, she ran unsuccessfully for City Council. And over a span of 26 years, she was involved in some capacity with 14 different political campaigns.
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.
Mrs. Murphy organized one of the first contingents of neighborhood VISTA volunteers, a group that later became active in the National Welfare Rights Organization and tenant organizing. During her life, she mentored many African-American women in Baltimore from childhood through college and beyond. Admirably, her community work was both personal and public, and grassroots as well as civic.
Mrs. Murphy served as a charter commissioner on the governing board of the city of Baltimore's Anti-Poverty Program (headed by the late 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.
Read more about this topic: Madeline Wheeler Murphy
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