Thomas E. Miller

Thomas Ezekiel Miller was born on June 17, 1849, at Ferrebeeville in the Beaufort District of South Carolina. Though his fair complexion drew lifelong speculation, he steadfastly regarded himself as a Black man and cast his life with his people. Historians record that his biological mother was a mulatto daughter of Judge Thomas Heyward Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his biological father a young white man whose family rejected the union; the infant was given up and raised by Richard and Mary Ferrebee Miller, a free family of color.

Educated first in Charleston's schools for free Black children, Miller traveled north, studied at the Hudson School on Long Island, and graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1872. He read law, was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1875, and entered public service as a Beaufort County school commissioner.

Miller rose through the South Carolina House of Representatives (1874–1880) and Senate (1880–1882), and in 1890 won election to the United States House, representing South Carolina's Seventh Congressional District — one of the last Black congressmen of the closing Reconstruction years. At the 1895 constitutional convention he argued eloquently against Black disfranchisement.

In 1896 he became the founding president of the state college for Black South Carolinians at Orangeburg, now South Carolina State University, guiding it for some fifteen years until his forced resignation in 1911. He died in Charleston on April 8, 1938. Let his name endure as a builder who taught, legislated, and stood for the dignity of his people when the tide ran hardest against them.