Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,014

This is the grave of Kelly Miller.

Born into slavery in 1863 in Winnsboro, South Carolina, Miller grew up in relatively decent circumstances it seems. His father was already a freed man from Charleston and being free during the Civil War generally meant that you were a skilled laborer and probably had access to better jobs than most ex-slaves would get. In any case, Miller was able to get a good education, something certainly not available to most freed slaves. The Presbyterians opened a school for freedpeople called Fairfield Institute and Miller attended in beginning in 1878. That led him to Howard University in 1882. He was very good at mathematics and that led to a job offer at the U.S. Naval Observatory under the leadership of an English mathematician named Edgar Frisby, who was a naval captain. He continued to impress everyone he ran into and so he was soon moved to Johns Hopkins University for more advanced study and he went to school there in 1887 and 1888. This made Miller the first Black graduate student in mathematics in American history.

Now, Miller didn’t have a lot of money. So he couldn’t complete his degree at Hopkins. He decided to support himself teaching math at Washington schools. That led Howard to hire him to teach math there in 1890. But Miller wasn’t some STEM asshole who has contempt for the humanities and social sciences. He had strong beliefs in the new social sciences, which perhaps reflected his time at Hopkins, which was pioneering so much of that at the time. In short, despite being a math professor, he introduced the study of sociology to Howard in 1895 and he moved his professorship to that department. He would teach there for nearly 40 years. He also decided that he didn’t have enough education himself so he enrolled in Howard’s law school and got that degree in 1903. He would spend much of the rest of his life modernizing the Howard curriculum and hiring the best professors he could to teach there. He also formed the Negro-Americana Museum and Library at Howard in 1914, which promoted Black intellectual life and achievements.

Miller spent the rest of his life as a senior leader in the Black rights movements. This usually gets divided into the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington and the radicalism of W.E.B. DuBois. That’s too simplistic, both because both men were complicated than that and because there were lots of other figures around with other ideas that were different than both men. Miller fit into that. If we wanted to put people in boxes that don’t fully describe but can be useful as a short hand, Miller was a sort of proto-Marcus Garvey figure. He rejected much of Washington’s ideas about being good little hard working Blacks with no political demands, but he didn’t believe the government was ever likely to do anything useful. So he promoted building Black political power within the free market. In this, he was joined by a lot of other people such as Maggie Walker, who used the tools of capitalism to build wealth and political power in the Black community in Richmond. As such, Miller saw no use for unions. He believed that the open shop was the best tool for the Black worker. Given how racially exclusive American unions were and how central that was for the American labor movement of the early 20th century, I can’t blame him for that position, as repellent as I would find it today.

Miller really was closer to DuBois than he ever was to Washington. He helped edit the NAACP paper The Crisis, working with DuBois on that. He wrote Race Adjustment in 1908 that pushed forward the idea that Black Americans should fight for their rights, including in the streets. He issued an open letter against Woodrow Wilson in 1917, calling out the president for his support of lynching. This letter became so popular among Black soldiers in World War I that the military tried to suppress it, claiming Miller was undermining morale among the troops. Glad that’s who you blame there and not, say, the lynchers!

Miller was deeply involved in lots of Black community building activities. He engaged in other Black pride activities, such as the American Negro Academy. That was Alexander Crummell’s baby, but Miller was one of the most active members. He would be demoted at Howard in 1919 and became somewhat less prominent after that, but continued to work at the university for the rest of his life. He actively defended Garvey in the 1920s from deportation. I don’t think he was an open Garveyite, but he certainly supported his right to organize and act in the ways that he did. He wrote of Garvey, “You can’t imprison ideas. It is better to let the false battle with the true and rely on the survival of the fittest.” Miller really was committed to a lot of these social scientific ideas of the time, as messed as they were in judging his own people. Anyway, he went on to say that it would only hurt the Black community to allow Garvey to be deported or imprisoned. He also said of Garvey, “He opened windows in the minds of black people, teaching the poorest of the poor that he, too, had dignity and a place in society.”

Also, just because Miller is forgotten today does not mean he wasn’t a huge deal in his time. He was probably the most widely read Black columnist in the country, with his writing appearing in over 100 newspapers at his peak. H.L. Mencken respected him very much for his writings on the so-called “Negro problem” in the awkward language of the era. One open letter he wrote to the white world received a published reply from President Harding. Another open letter was printed in the Congressional Record and then made into a pamphlet. It sold about 125,000 copies. He also toured the nation pretty frequently, including the South, giving speeches to both Black and white audiences, although obviously the former more frequently. He was more an observer of his time than a man with a really strongly held philosophical position through his life. This probably goes a long ways as to why he’s mostly forgotten–he simply wasn’t as easy to pigeonhole as Washington, DuBois, or Garvey.

Miller really was the faculty member who never retires. In fact, he died on campus in 1939. He was 76 years old.

Kelly Miller is buried in Lincoln Memorial Cemetery, Suitland, Maryland.

If you would like this series to visit other Black intellectuals, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Martin Delany is in Cedarville, Ohio and Harold Cruse is in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.