Lesson 159:
Thomas Ezekiel Miller
An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted on 10/11/2024
"The majority of you blame the poor Negro for the humility inflicted upon you during that conflict, but he had nothing to do with it. It was your love of power and your supreme arrogance that brought it upon yourselves. You are too feeble to settle up with the government for that grudge. This hatred has been centered on the Negro and he is the innocent sufferer of your spleen."
Right from the start, Thomas Ezekiel Miller's life would be unusually complicated. Born in 1849 South Carolina, his mother was herself a half-Black, half-white daughter of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence (Judge Thomas Heyward, Jr.); and his father a white man who rejected his parental responsibilities and insisted his child instead be given up for adoption. Thomas was then raised by two Free Black parents, Richard and Mary Ferrebee Miller (who had themselves been freed in 1850), and received a solid education in Sumter, though he did also serve for a time with the Confederate army with supplies and delivery, even being imprisoned by Union forces for several weeks. After the war he began his legal education in New York. While Thomas's unusually light complexion would have certainly permitted him to "pass" as white in New York (or indeed, in any northern state) but after receiving his degree in 1872 from Lincoln University, he instead chose to return to South Carolina, where he would determinedly live his adult life as Black.
1872 fell squarely in the middle of Radical Reconstruction, when the Northern military still firmly controlled the former Confederate state governments, and Miller, even while still pursuing his law degree, became the Commissioner of Beaufort County education, determined to get more Black teachers into the Charleston city schools. From there he was able to leverage into becoming elected to the state general assembly in 1874, 1876, and 1878. Over the course of these three terms he was at last admitted to the bar in 1875, and was named Republican state party chairman in 1884.
Miller's next goal was to run for Congress (S.C., 7th Dist.); he lost against Democrat William Elliott, but Miller successfully contested the election results when it was revealed that many Black voters in key localities had not been permitted to cast their ballots, and Miller was sworn into the 51st Congress on September 24, 1888. In 1890 he ran for re-election, again facing off against Elliott, but this time Elliott hung onto his victory, again challenging the election results as fraudulent. (Is this all beginning to sound just a little too familiar?) The S.C. state Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Elliott's favor on the basis of "inconsistent ballot sizes and colors." (Come on people, does history repeat itself that blatantly?) Miller pursued his appeal and made a stirring speech on the House floor in support of a proposed Federal bill that would oversee federal elections and protect voters from violence and intimidation. Unfortunately by the time the elections committee convened to confirm Elliott's victory, Miller had already lost in the next election primary to George W. Murray, thereby ending his sole term in Congress.
Miller returned to the state legislature for another term, eloquently pushing back against the growing sentiment that Blacks were contributing to the South's slow economic recovery, arguing instead that White southerners were in fact primarily responsible for the region's economic problems because they were motivated by bigotry and vengeance, in denying Blacks full citizenship rights. Miller also attended the state constitutional convention in 1895 along with fellow former congressman Robert Smalls (see Lesson #107 in this series) but to little avail; the convention ended with prohibitively high property ownership requirements, crippling poll taxes, and wildly skewed literacy tests being written into law and effectively ending Black enfranchisement in South Carolina. Despite these setbacks (and even weathering accusations from some of his fellow Black Americans that, given his light complexion, that he had only ever been acting in his own selfish interests), Miller remained an outspoken voice for Black voting rights. Now out of public life, Miller's final years were committed to his law practice and also to the establishment and modernization of the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College of South Carolina (now the State College of South Carolina). He was named to its Board of Trustees and then served as its President until 1911. He and his wife Anna Hume moved to Powelton, Pennsylvania in 1921, but after Anna's death in 1936 Miller moved back to Charleston, where he stayed until his own death in 1938.
Next page - Lesson 160: Henry Dumas
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