Newsies, 1930 - 1979

Printed stories about the AFRO’s youngest employees, the AFRO newspaper carriers or “newsies,” are found as early as 1912, when the AFRO was still known as the AFRO American Ledger, and already employed both boys and girls to sell papers at that time. A recruitment article from 1959 states there were 3500 AFRO Carriers that year. The morgue files about newsies reflect the active recruitment efforts to recruit and retain newsies through incentives, depicting newsies enjoying the many prizes, parties, picnics, local excursions, and overnight trips the AFRO organized for their news carriers. Top prizes for top sellers included multiple trips to New York City and at least one trip to Disneyland in California in 1960. In 1939, 1940, and 1964 Baltimore newsies attended the New York World’s Fair. Recruitment articles also tout the lessons in business and responsibility to be learned as an AFRO news carrier, in addition to the wages. Much of Baltimore’s late 20th century Black business and government leadership began their working lives as AFRO newspaper carriers, with congressman Elijah Cummings being among the most famous former newsies. The Newsies program began to wane in the early 1970s, which Howard H. Murphy, then Comptroller of the newspaper, attributed to parents’ increasing safety concerns in a 1971 interview.