Eddie Brown’s journey to success began in the small segregated town of Apopka, Florida, where poverty was a reality, but perseverance was his guiding force.   “Someone once told me, ‘It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish,’” Eddie Brown recalls.   Growing up without electricity or running water, he became the first in his family to graduate from high school in the late 1950s and college in the early 1960s. “Until about five or six years ago, I was still the only one in my family to have graduated

By Loán C. Lake, Photo by P. A. Greene Baltimore native Judge William H. “Billy” Murphy, Jr. loves speaking truth to power. He hails from an extensive line of successful entrepreneurs and brave community leaders, including his great-grandfather John H. Murphy, Sr., founder of the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper. Murphy, who grew up in Cherry Hill, is the senior partner of the Baltimore-based law firm Murphy Falcon & Murphy launched by his father, retired Maryland District Court Judge William H. Murphy, Sr., in 1948.   Law was not the original plan.