Kelly Miller

Kelly Miller was born in July 1863 at Winnsboro, South Carolina, the sixth of ten children of Kelly Miller Sr., a free Black tenant farmer, and Elizabeth Roberts, who had been enslaved. Born in the last year of the Civil War, he rose from Reconstruction-era poverty through the Fairfield Institute and Howard University, where he earned his degree in 1886. In 1887 he entered Johns Hopkins University as its first African American student, pursuing graduate study in mathematics, physics, and astronomy — the first African American to undertake graduate mathematics in the United States.

In 1890 Miller joined the Howard University faculty as a professor of mathematics. Recognizing that his people needed rigorous social analysis as much as pure science, he introduced sociology into the curriculum in 1895 and became its first professor, a chair he held until 1934. He grounded the study of Black American life in evidence at a moment when its dignity was widely denied.

From 1907 to 1919 he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, modernizing an old classical course of study and building out the natural and social sciences. He helped secure Jesse E. Moorland's collection, seeding what became Howard's great archive of African American history and culture.

Beyond the campus he was a tireless essayist and columnist, "the Bard of the Potomac," whose measured voice reached more than a hundred newspapers and mediated between the philosophies of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. He died on the Howard campus on December 29, 1939. We honor Kelly Miller, who turned a freedman's inheritance into learning, and learning into a lasting light for his people.