I believe that the Afro-American (Maryland paper) has been digitized through the Chronicling America project, which would mean of course that it could be searched for free. I was trying to double check this, but the site has been down for at least the last couple days.

A portion of it, from 1893-98 is on GenealogyBank.

And, you may want to look at this link which may take you to another free version of the paper.