About Ric Murphy

RIC MURPHY is a historian, educator, author, and filmmaker. His most recent work is the Arrival of the First Africans in English America, which received the 2020 Phyllis Wheatley Award and became an award-winning documentary. Murphy has participated in academic and public history symposia at museums, libraries, and cultural institutions. He lectures frequently on historical and current events, and consults with federal, state, and local governments, and Fortune 500 corporations. He is the founder and President General of the Society of the First African Families of English America, and is a scholar on the history and relationships of Americans of African, European, and Indigenous descent during America’s colonial and antebellum periods.

Through his works he has contributed immensely to the research, documentation, and preservation of African American history and culture from the arrival of the first documented Africans in English America in 1619 through the colonial period to the American Revolutionary War, and beyond. Murphy’s work and commentary have been cited by journalists and historians in major national media outlets and used in broader discussions of African American genealogy, historical commemoration, and military service. He has written numerous books and served as editor of the award-winning book the Forgotten Patriots of the Northern Theater.

Murphy’s family lineage dates to the earliest colonial periods of Jamestown, Virginia and of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and has been evaluated and accepted by several heredity societies, including but not limited to the General Society Sons of the Revolution; the Daughters of the American Revolution (through his mother); the National Society of the Sons of Colonial New England; the Sons of the American Revolution; the Sons of the Union Veterans of the Civil War; the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage; and the Society of the First African Families of English America. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Boston University and was a resident fellow at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government.