Baltimore's AFRO-American Newspapers turned 134 years old this week, marking the milestone with its 6th Annual Black Business Expo at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History & Culture in downtown Baltimore. The event, themed “Powering Prosperity in the Age of AI,” brought together entrepreneurs, judges and a live audience for a pitch competition that awarded cash prizes to small business finalists.
According to WBAL-TV, the expo's Power Pitch competition drew 60 entries in its second year, giving entrepreneurs a chance to pitch their businesses directly to judges. AFRO CEO and publisher Frances “Toni” Draper said the expo reflects the newspaper's longstanding commitment to Baltimore's Black community while looking toward the future, per the station's report. WBAL-TV serves as an official media partner of the expo, and the station's coverage was written by Jerome Chester, who also serves as the paper's director of programming and public affairs.
Laundry Startup Takes Top Pitch Prize
This year's Power Pitch winner was The Laundry Basket LLC, a laundry subscription service founded by Army veteran Hyacinth Tucker that serves both individual households and corporate clients. Per the same account, the company counts Amazon, Delta Airlines and the PGA among its corporate customers, and it was previously featured in The Guardian. Founded in 2022, the company provides healthcare-grade laundry pickup and delivery, washing nearly 7,000 pounds of laundry monthly across Maryland, Washington, D.C., Northern Virginia, Ohio and Toronto, according to Inc. Magazine.
The Baltimore win builds on a string of pitch-competition success for Tucker. Baltimore Fishbowl reported that The Laundry Basket LLC previously won the $25,000 grand prize in The UPS Store Small Biz Challenge in April, beating out nearly 6,000 national applicants. Tucker has competed in 18 pitch competitions total to fund her company's growth without relying on what the outlet describes as unsustainable predatory loans.
Other honorees at the expo included Aniya Keene, principal of TestPatient, and Eean Logan, principal of I Got Drive, both recognized alongside Tucker as AFRO News honored Black entrepreneurs and businesses at the event. Finalists in the Power Pitch competition received cash awards and other resources intended to help them grow, WBAL-TV noted.
An AI Theme Rooted in a Morgan State Partnership
The expo's artificial intelligence focus grew out of a collaboration between AFRO News and the Clarence M. Mitchell, Jr. School of Engineering at Morgan State University, according to AFRO-American Newspapers. Morgan State, Baltimore's premier public urban research HBCU, helped shape sessions aimed at integrating AI into everyday business operations for the entrepreneurs in attendance.
The pairing of AI programming with a legacy Black newspaper is no accident given the region's business landscape. The Baltimore-Columbia-Towson metropolitan area ranks sixth among major U.S. metro regions for Black employer firm concentration, with Black-owned businesses accounting for 8.0% of all employer firms, according to U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by Stacker — well above the 3.2% national share despite African Americans comprising 13.7% of the U.S. population. Maryland, meanwhile, ranks first among U.S. states for minority-owned business climate, with minority-owned firms making up 25.4% of all companies statewide, per the Maryland Department of Commerce.
A 134-Year Legacy Tied to a West Baltimore Homecoming
AFRO News traces its roots to 1892, when founder John H. Murphy Sr., a formerly enslaved man and Union Army veteran, launched the publication with a $200 investment from his wife, Martha Howard Murphy, to buy printing equipment and merge several church newsletters, according to Gado Images. That history makes AFRO the oldest continuously operating family-owned Black newspaper in the country. Under editor-publisher Carl Murphy in the 20th century, the paper expanded to 13 regional East Coast editions and reached a circulation of 235,000 by 1945, even dispatching Langston Hughes to cover international conflicts, according to Baltimore Heritage.
That legacy is now anchored in a major preservation effort in West Baltimore. Nonprofit partner Afro Charities is leading a restoration of the historic 1838 Upton Mansion, budgeted between $13.8 million and $16 million, to serve as the newspaper's permanent headquarters and a research center for its archive of more than 3 million photographs, per Baltimore Magazine. The mansion had sat vacant since 2006 before securing state, federal, and philanthropic funding for the project.
The expo's host venue carries its own institutional weight. The Reginald F. Lewis Museum opened in 2005 as a Smithsonian Institution affiliate housing more than 11,000 artifacts spanning 400 years of Black Maryland history, and is named for the Baltimore native who built TLC Beatrice International into the first Black-owned billion-dollar business in the U.S. Hoodline previously reported that the state-run museum received $2.7 million in general-fund operating grants and recorded 29,648 visitors during fiscal year 2025.
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