MILLER, KELLY (18 July 1863–29 December 1939), African American mathematician, sociologist, activist, and author known as “the Bard of the Potomac.”
Born in Winnsboro, South Carolina, Miller was the sixth of ten children. His mother was a former slave and his father, a freeman, had nevertheless been drafted into the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Miller showed promise early on, and at the age of fifteen, at the recommendation of a local minister, he enrolled at the Fairfield Institute in Winnsboro and then Howard University, where he studied Latin, Greek, and mathematics.
After graduation Miller studied advanced mathematics with the English mathematician Edgar Frisby at the United States Naval Observatory. Frisby’s chief at the observatory, Simon Newcomb, also a mathematics professor, soon noticed Miller’s unusual gifts and recommended him for admission to Johns Hopkins University, which had recently become the first American school to offer a graduate program in mathematics. Miller was accepted and became the first African American student at Johns Hopkins.
Miller studied mathematics, physics, and astronomy for two years before a sudden increase in tuition forced him to leave in 1889, after which Johns Hopkins once again prohibited Black students from enrolling. Miller then briefly taught high school in Washington, DC, before joining his alma mater Howard’s faculty as a professor of mathematics. Five years into his tenure there Miller introduced sociology to the university’s curriculum, believing study of the subject would deepen students’ understanding of racism’s social and institutional functions in the United States.
Miller continued his education while on the faculty at Howard, receiving a master’s in mathematics in 1901 and a law degree in 1903. In 1907 he was appointed dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and switched to teaching sociology exclusively. During his twelve years as dean Miller changed Howard dramatically, increasing enrollment and modernizing the curriculum. In 1915 he was also named head of the sociology department.
Miller used his bully pulpit as one of the most prominent African American academics to advocate for his vision for Black educational and political advancement in the wake of the failure of Reconstruction. He hewed to a middle course between the “acommodationist” vocational-education model espoused by Booker T. Washington, on the one hand, and the more radical rights-driven approach of W.E.B. Du Bois, on the other. Miller thought Washington’s championing of skilled trades too modest in its goals and stressed instead the need for a robust Black professional class of physicians, lawyers, and teachers, the constitution of which would require institutes of higher education available to Black aspirants.
Miller would also weigh in importantly on the deteriorating civil-rights situation for African Americans in the early decades of the twentieth century. In the wake of attacks by White mobs on Blacks in East St. Louis and Memphis in 1917 he penned the anti-lynching pamphlet “The Disgrace of Democracy: An Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson,” which sold over 250,000 copies. In the twelve-page letter, Miller railed against the enforced powerlessness of African Americans that allowed them to be routinely victimized in such a shocking manner, with the perpetrators facing no consequences. He encouraged President Wilson to act at the federal level to prevent future massacres, arguing that “as long as the black man is excluded from participation in the government of the nation, just so long will he be the victim of cruelty and outrage on the part of his white fellow citizens who assume lordship over him.” Miller leveraged Black participation in World War I to argue that there was a debt owed to the community, and copies of the pamphlet circulated freely in US military libraries before army officials banned the document from military premises.
Miller wrote more than twenty-five books and countless essays, and his weekly newspaper columns for the Black press were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s—it was estimated that they were read by as many as half a million people. He died in 1939 at age seventy-six in his home on the Howard campus.