Kelly Miller

Kelly Miller was born on the twenty-third of July 1863 at Winnsboro, South Carolina, the sixth of ten children of Kelly Miller Sr. — a free Black tenant farmer of mixed African and Native American descent — and Elizabeth Roberts Miller, a formerly enslaved house servant of the Roberts plantation. The family had migrated from Charleston to the South Carolina upcountry in the 1850s. He attended the Fairfield Institute at Winnsboro — the freedpeople's school established by the Northern Presbyterian Board after Emancipation — from 1875 to 1880. He took the bachelor's at Howard University in 1886.

He was admitted in 1887 to the graduate programme in mathematics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore — making him the first African American admitted to a graduate programme in mathematics at any American university. He studied under the mathematician Simon Newcomb until 1889, when financial constraint and the increasing hostility of the white Hopkins student body forced him to leave without completing the doctorate. He joined the Howard University faculty as instructor of mathematics in 1890.

He was promoted across the following sixteen years from instructor of mathematics to professor of mathematics, professor of sociology — the first chair of sociology at any historically Black college — and finally in 1907 to dean of the Howard University College of Arts and Sciences. He served as dean from 1907 to 1919 and directed the founding of the Howard sociology department, the systematic recruitment of the second generation of Black PhDs from northern universities into the Howard faculty, and the consolidation of Howard as the principal post-baccalaureate intellectual centre of African American life.

He published seven books — Race Adjustment (1908), Out of the House of Bondage (1914), An Appeal to Conscience (1918), Negroes in the New World Order (1921), History of the World War for Human Rights (1919), The Everlasting Stain (1924) and An Appeal to the Conscience of the South — and the weekly newspaper column "Kelly Miller Says," which was syndicated to over a hundred Black weekly newspapers from 1917 to his death and constituted the most widely-read regular column in African American journalism of the early twentieth century.

He occupied an explicitly mediating position in the Booker T. Washington-W. E. B. Du Bois controversy — taking from Washington the programme of practical economic development and from Du Bois the demand for political franchise — and his Race Adjustment of 1908 is the principal documentary statement of this synthesis position.

He died at Washington on the twenty-ninth of December 1939, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the dean of Howard.