Edgar Gardner Murphy (1869–1913) was an American clergyman and author during the Progressive Era in the United States who had a conflicted past, working to improve relations between African Americans and whites while also appeasing white nationalists^[1]and wrote about issues faced, as well as working to improve child labor laws and public education.^[2][3]

Murphy was born at Fort Smith, Arkansas, graduated from the University of the South at Sewanee in 1889, and served as a priest of the Episcopal Church for twelve years. After 1903, he worked exclusively in educational and social work. Murphy served as executive secretary of the Southern Education Board, vice president of the Conference for Education in the South, organizer and secretary of the Southern Society for Consideration of Race Problems and Conditions in the South, and organizer and first secretary of the National Child Labor Committee.^[4]

• Words for the Church (1896)
• The Larger Life (1896)
• Problems of the Present South (1904; second edition, 1909)
• The Basis of Ascendency (1909)
• Up From History, The Life Of Booker T. Washington (2009)

• William Porcher DuBose

• Harlan, Louis R. Separate and unequal: Public school campaigns and racism in the southern seaboard states, 1901–1915 (1958) online; covers his roles in the Conference for Education in the South and the Southern Education Board .

• Luker, Ralph. A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 1830–1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher DuBose, and Edgar Gardner Murphy. (Mellen Press, 1984) ISBN 0-88946-655-6, ISBN 978-0-88946-655-5.
• White, Ronald C. "Beyond the Sacred: Edgar Gardner Murphy and a Ministry of Social Reform." Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 49.1 (1980): 51–69. online

• Wood, Betsy. Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism (U. of Illinois Press, 2020) pp 51–83.