E. Jefferson Murphy

Last updated

Emmett Jefferson Murphy, who wrote as E. Jefferson Murphy, (July 2, 1926 - June 19, 2013) [1] [ unreliable source? ] was a historian of Africa. He had a distinguished career with the African-American Institute, and wrote a series of favorably reviewed books on African history between 1969 and 1981. His History of African Civilization is a classic textbook on African history.

Contents

Career

Born in Thomasville, Georgia, on July 2, 1926, Murphy began his career as an African specialist while serving as visiting lecturer in social anthropology at South Africa's University College of Fort Hare (then the only college for non-whites in apartheid South Africa). He served the African American Institute in Washington (U.S.), New York City (USA), Accra (Ghana, and Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) between 1954 and 1970. From 1965 to 1970 he was the institute's Executive Vice President in New York, retiring in that year to return to the academic field.

From 1971 to 1973 he completed his doctoral studies, then became full-time consultant to Carnegie Corporation of New York. In 1975 he was named Coordinator and chief executive officer of Five College, Inc., the consortium linking Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [2] [ failed verification ] Murphy retired as coordinator in 1988, to serve as Five College Professor of African Studies, based at Smith College, until his retirement in 1991.

Wider interests

In retirement Murphy devoted himself to political activism, serving as vice president and Steering Committee member of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice; Steering Committee member of the Southwest Florida Peace Coalition, and as chief writer and consultant for the internet emailing service of Progressive Secretary.

A member of the Sarasota Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers), he was also an avid sailor and amateur home builder. He married Winifred WindRiver and had three children by a former marriage, including Emmett J. Murphy III, known as Murph, who plays drums in the rock band Dinosaur Jr.

Publications

History of African Civilization was published by Thomas Y. Crowell Company in 1972, and later that same year in paperback by Dell Books. Hollis Lynch, Professor Emeritus of African History at Columbia University, wrote the introduction to the paperback edition. In 1981, it was translated into Romanian and published as a two-volume paperback by Biblioteca Pentru Toti.

Murphy also wrote Understanding Africa (1969 & 1980), The Bantu Civilization of Southern Africa (1974), and Creative Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation and Africa 1953-1973 (1975). He also co-authored, with Harry Stein, Teaching Africa Today, (1973) a handbook for American social studies teachers.

As of 2006, all Murphy's books are out of print.

Works

Related Research Articles

Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives for the public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private good, focusing on material gain; and with government endeavors that are public initiatives for public good, such as those that focus on the provision of public services. A person who practices philanthropy is a philanthropist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie library</span> Libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie

A Carnegie library is a library built with money donated by Scottish-American businessman and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. A total of 2,509 Carnegie libraries were built between 1883 and 1929, including some belonging to public and university library systems. 1,689 were built in the United States, 660 in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 125 in Canada, and 25 others in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Serbia, Belgium, France, the Caribbean, Mauritius, Malaysia, and Fiji.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arthur Llewellyn Basham</span> British historian and Indologist (1914–1986)

Arthur Llewellyn Basham was a noted historian, Indologist and author of a number of books. As a Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London in the 1950s and the 1960s, he taught a number of famous historians of India, including professors Ram Sharan Sharma, Romila Thapar, and V. S. Pathak and Thomas R. Trautmann and David Lorenzen.

Milton Meltzer was an American historian and author best known for his nonfiction books on Jewish, African-American, and American history. Since the 1950s, he was a prolific author of history books in the children's literature and young adult literature genres, having written nearly 100 books. Meltzer was an advocate for human rights, as well as an adjunct professor for the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He won the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for his career contribution to American children's literature in 2001. Meltzer died of esophageal cancer in 2009.

Ellen Raskin was an American children's writer and illustrator. She won the 1979 Newbery Medal for The Westing Game, a mystery novel, and another children's mystery, Figgs & Phantoms, was a Newbery Honor Book in 1975.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carnegie Corporation of New York</span> American philanthropic fund

The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Sobel</span> American historian (1931–1999)

Robert Sobel was an American professor of history at Hofstra University and a well-known and prolific writer of business histories.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chummy MacGregor</span> American jazz musician

John Chalmers MacGregor, better known as Chummy MacGregor, a musician and composer, was the pianist in The Glenn Miller Orchestra from 1936 to 1942. He composed the songs "Moon Dreams", "It Must Be Jelly ", "I Sustain the Wings", "Doin' the Jive", "Sold American", "Cutesie Pie" in 1932 with Bing Crosby and Red Standex, and "Slumber Song".

Something Else Press was founded by Dick Higgins in 1963. It published many important Intermedia texts and artworks by such Fluxus artists as Higgins, Ray Johnson, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, George Brecht, Daniel Spoerri, Robert Filliou, Al Hansen, John Cage, Emmett Williams and by such important modernist figures as Gertrude Stein, Henry Cowell, and Bern Porter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Franklin A. Thomas</span> American businessman and philanthropist (1934–2021)

Franklin Augustine Thomas was an American businessman and philanthropist who was president and CEO of the Ford Foundation from 1979 until 1996. After leaving the foundation, Thomas continued to serve in leadership positions in American corporations and was on the board of the TFF Study Group, a nonprofit institution assisting development in South Africa. Thomas was chairman of the nonprofit organization September 11th Fund from 2001 to 2004 and was involved in the Nelson Mandela Children's Fund, having served as the manager of its American office.

Richard B. Bernstein was an American constitutional historian, a distinguished adjunct professor of law at New York Law School, and lecturer in law and political science at the City College of New York's Skadden, Arps Honors Program in Legal Studies in its Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Fletcher Dole</span>

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) was a Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, Massachusetts, and Chairman of the Association to Abolish War. He authored a substantial number of books on politics, history, and theology.

Robert Murrell Stevenson was an American musicologist. He studied at the College of Mines and Metallurgy of the University of Texas at El Paso, the Juilliard School of Music, Yale University (MM) and the University of Rochester ; further study took him to Harvard University, Princeton Theological Seminary and Oxford University. He taught at the University of Texas and at Westminster Choir College in the 1940s. In 1949 he became a faculty member at the University of California at Los Angeles, where he taught until 1987. Stevenson is well known for having studied with Igor Stravinsky when he was young, and for later being a teacher of influential minimalist La Monte Young.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Paul Keppel</span>

Frederick Paul Keppel was an American educator and executive in the field of philanthropy. In education he served as dean of Columbia College, in government he served as Third Assistant Secretary of War, and in philanthropy he served as president of the Carnegie Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara W. Newell</span> American academic administrator (born 1929)

Barbara Warne Newell is an economist, career professor, and higher education administrator. Notably, she served as the tenth President of Wellesley College from 1972 to 1980 and was the first female chancellor of the State University System of Florida from 1981 to 1985.

David Wight Prall (1886–1940) was a philosopher of art and an academic. His interests include aesthetics, value theory, abstract ideas, truth and the history of philosophy. He is noted for his notion of aesthetic surfaces.

Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery is a 1997 television documentary miniseries about the Lewis and Clark Expedition directed and co-produced by Ken Burns. It is produced by Burns' Florentine Films for Washington, DC PBS station WETA-TV, first aired on PBS on November 4 and 5, 1997.

William O'Rourke is an American writer of both novels and volumes of nonfiction; he is the author of the novels The Meekness of Isaac, Idle Hands, Criminal Tendencies, and Notts, as well as the nonfiction books, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, Signs of the Literary Times: Essays, Reviews, Profiles, and On Having a Heart Attack: A Medical Memoir. He is the editor of On the Job: Fiction About Work by Contemporary American Writers and the co-editor of Notre Dame Review: The First Ten Years. His book, Campaign America '96: The View From the Couch, first published in 1997, was reissued in paperback with a new, updated epilogue in 2000. A sequel, Campaign America 2000: The View From the Couch, was published in 2001.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edwin A. Grosvenor</span>

Edwin Augustus Grosvenor was a historian, author, chairman of the history department at Amherst College, and president of the national organization of Phi Beta Kappa societies from 1907 to 1919. Grosvenor was called "one of the most cosmopolitan of Americans" by author and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson. His son, Gilbert Hovey Grosvenor, was the first employee and longtime editor of National Geographic Magazine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emmett Jay Scott</span> American political advisor

Emmett Jay Scott was an American journalist, founding newspaper editor, government official and envoy, educator, and author. He was Booker T. Washington's closest adviser at the Tuskegee Institute. He was responsible for maintaining Washington's nationwide "machine," with its close links to the black business leadership, white philanthropists, and Republican politicians from the local level to the White House. After Washington's death, Scott lost his Tuskegee connection, but moved to Washington, D.C. as Special Adviser of Black Affairs to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker. Scott was the highest-ranking African-American in President Woodrow Wilson's administration. After 1919, he was less and less visible in national affairs, with the NAACP taking the leadership role that Booker T. Washington had dominated.

References

  1. "Emmett Jefferson Murphy". Legacy.com Memorials. Archived from the original on April 14, 2020. Retrieved August 15, 2016.
  2. "Home". fivecolleges.edu.