AFRO founder John Henry Murphy Sr. understood the importance of a newspaper that served as the voice of the Black community and a repository of its stories and history. Credit: Photos courtesy of the Afro American Newspaper Archives / Afro Charities

EYEBROW: The Voting Rights Act: Part  Five of a Five-Part Series

Independent Black media isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the infrastructure that has kept Black communities informed through every wave of suppression since 1892. The AFRO needs your support right now. Here’s why that matters as much as any lawsuit.

By Portia Wood
Special to the AFRO

I want to close this series by talking about something that doesn’t get discussed the way lawsuits and legislation do, but that is just as important to the fight: who is keeping the record.

The Voting Rights Act was not passed by people who woke up one morning and decided to march. It was passed because, for decades before it existed, Black communities had institutions — churches, civic organizations and newspapers — that kept them informed about what was happening to them, connected to each other across geography, and organized enough to act when the moment came. The AFRO was one of those institutions. It still is.

134 years of keeping the record

John Henry Murphy Sr. founded this newspaper in 1892 in the wreckage of Reconstruction. He understood that a community that doesn’t control any part of its own narrative is a community that can be erased from the record entirely. He built the AFRO so that could not happen — at least not quietly.

In 1905, the AFRO organized readers against the Poe Amendment and Maryland didn’t disenfranchise its Black voters. In the 1930s, the paper partnered with the NAACP on the legal work that became Brown v. Board. During the Civil Rights Movement, it sent reporters where the mainstream press wouldn’t go, and as Carl Murphy said: “Black people wouldn’t believe what was going on unless they read it in one of their own papers.” When the Voting Rights Act was signed in 1965, the AFRO covered it. When Shelby County gutted Section 5 in 2013, the AFRO covered it. When the AFRO’s publisher saw Callais coming in October 2025, she wrote an editorial saying so — six months before the decision dropped.

In 1905, the AFRO organized readers against the Poe Amendment, proposed legislation that would have disenfranchised Black voters through “grandfather clauses” and other restrictive requirements, and in so doing helped defeat the measure. Seen here are two articles from that year on the subject.
Credit: Photos courtesy of the Afro American Newspaper Archives / Afro Charities

That is not just journalism. That is an institution doing exactly what it was built to do, across four and five generations of the same family, for 134 years.

Why this is building infrastructure, not charity

When you support the AFRO, you are not donating to a cause. You are funding a piece of infrastructure that the community needs to stay informed, connected and organized—especially now, when the legal protections that were supposed to do some of that work have just been gutted.

In April 1942, the AFRO documents the March on Annapolis, a pivotal civil rights protest organized by local Baltimore leaders, including then-AFRO Publisher Carl J. Murphy. Spurred on by the police killing of Thomas Broadus, a Black soldier, an estimated 2,000 protestors board buses outside of Sharpe Street Church in Baltimore to descend on the Maryland capitol. Decades before the height of the Civil Rights Movement, the AFRO was recording each tiny step toward equal rights for Black people.
Credit: Photos courtesy of the Afro American Newspaper Archives / Afro Charities

The suppression of Black voting rights has always been paired with the suppression of Black information. The literacy tests that kept people from the ballot box were the same machinery that kept people from reading. The poll watcher intimidation that kept people from the polls was the same machinery that kept Black journalists from being taken seriously by the mainstream press. The AFRO exists because Black communities understood, a long time ago, that having your own press is part of having your own political power.

 “The suppression of Black voting rights has always been paired with the suppression of Black information.”

That is still true. It is more true right now than it has been in decades because the federal enforcement mechanisms that provided some protection are gone, and what replaces them — state courts, state legislative organizing, sustained civic participation — all depend on a community that is informed about what is actually happening and why.

The AFRO provides that. It is still Black-owned and family-led. It publishes in print weekly and online daily. It covered the Callais arguments in October 2025, the ruling in April 2026, and the 72-hour ambush that followed. It is not going to stop covering this story. But it needs readers who show up.

The AFRO has been telling this story since before it had a name. What we owe it is simple: show up the way it has shown up for us.

What showing up looks like

Subscribe. A subscription to the AFRO puts money directly into the institution that is covering the story of what is being done to your community’s political power in real time.


The AFRO represents 134 of the Black Press, maintained by several generations of one family. The AFRO’s archives is one of the most significant records of Black American life in existence.
Credit: Photos courtesy of the Afro American Newspaper Archives / Afro Charities

Donate. The AFRO‘s donation page is at afro.com/donate. The BTFK Morning Briefing, which sent its readers to the AFRO this week, said it plainly: “If you can only support one outlet today, support theirs.” That’s still the right call.

Share the reporting. The AFRO’s coverage of Callais — its news analysis, the ASALH statement, the publisher’s October 2025 editorial — is the kind of reporting that should be in every Black family’s group chat, every church’s bulletin, every civic organization’s newsletter. Share it.

Support the organizations litigating. The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the ACLU Voting Rights Project, and Democracy Docket are in courtrooms right now with the tools that remain. They need sustained financial support.

And then organize at the state level. State legislative races. State supreme court races. State attorney general races. These offices now hold more of the practical power over your right to vote than they ever have. Treat them like it.

The long arc

I started this series in the present — an election cancelled by executive order, five states calling special sessions in 48 hours, a Supreme Court ruling that stripped the last enforcement mechanism from a law paid for in blood. I want to end it here: with the understanding that this is not the first time this country has tried to take back what Black Americans fought to win, and it has not succeeded permanently before.

Post-Reconstruction disenfranchisement lasted decades before the Civil Rights Movement cracked it open. Shelby County came down in 2013, and Black voter turnout in 2018 reached levels not seen since the VRA’s early years. The arc is long. The people who built the AFRO in 1892, who organized against the Poe Amendment in 1905, who covered Bloody Sunday in 1965, knew this. They did the work anyway. They passed the institution forward to the next generation anyway.

That’s what we’re being asked to do now. Not to fix it today. To do the work today so the generation behind us has something to work with.

The AFRO has been doing that work for 134 years. The least we can do is make sure it’s still standing.

Subscribe and donate at afro.com/donate.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.


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