Kelly Miller

Kelly Miller was Johns Hopkins University's first black student. Kelly Miller was born July 18, 1863 in Winnsboro, South Carolina and died December 29, 1939. Kelly Miller was the sixth of ten children born to Kelly Miller, a free Negro who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and Elizabeth Miller, a slave. Miller received his early education in one of the local primary schools established during Reconstruction and was recommended to an institute by a missionary who recognized Miller's mathematical abilities.

Miller attended the Fairfield Institute in Winnsboro, South Carolina from 1878 to 1880. Awarded a scholarship to Howard University, he completed the Preparatory Department's three-year curriculum in Latin, Greek, and mathematics in two years, then attended the College Department at Howard from 1882 to 1886. Kelly Miller was a force in the intellectual life of black America for close to half a century. Miller was a mathematician, a sociologist, an essayist, and a newspaper columnist.

Born in South Carolina in 1863, he worked his way through Howard University, then did postgraduate work at Johns Hopkins, the first black ever admitted to that university. Appointed professor of mathematics at Howard in 1890, Miller introduced sociology into the curriculum in 1895, serving as professor of sociology from 1895 to 1934. As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, he modernized the classical curriculum, strengthening the natural and social sciences. Miller was a prolific writer whose articles appeared in the major newspapers and magazines of the day.

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In the 1920s and 1930s, his weekly column appeared in more than 100 newspapers. On African-American education policy, Miller aligned himself with neither the radicals - Du Bois and the Niagara Movement -- or the "conservatives" - the followers of Booker T. Washington. Miller sought a middle way, a comprehensive education system that would provide for "symmetrical development" of African-American citizens by offering both vocational and intellectual instruction. Equally active outside the university, he wrote an influential column circulated in more than one hundred newspapers across the country, assisted W.

E. B. Du Bois as an editor of the Crisis magazine, and authored several important pamphlets, including “The Disgrace of Democracy: An Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson” , and a series of essays, some of which were compiled and published as books. The best of these include From Servitude to Service , Race Adjustment , Out of the House of Bondage , and The Everlasting Stain . During the period from 1882 to 1886, while Miller attended the College Department at Howard University, he also worked as a clerk for the U. S. Pension Office for two years.

Kelly Miller was appointed to the position in the Pension Office after taking the civil service examination a test prescribed by the Civil Service Act passed during the administration of President Grover Cleveland. Miller's greatest influence while at Howard University where his professors of Latin (James Monroe Gregory) and History (President William Weston Patton, who also taught philosophy and conducted weekly vesper services required of all students). He received a Bachelor of Science from Howard University in 1886, a Master of Arts in 1901 and a law degree in 1903.

Miller continued to work at the Pension Office after graduation in 1886. Miller studied mathematics at The Johns Hopkins University from 1886 to 1887 under the direction of Captain Edgar Frisby, an English mathematician at the U. S. Naval Observatory. Frisby was also the assistant of the person who recommended Miller for graduate study, Simon Newcomb, a famous astronomer in charge o the the U. S. Naval Observatory and a Professor of Mathematics at The Johns Hopkins University. At the end of 1887, Miller asked Newcombe to recommend Miller's admission to The Johns Hopkins University to University President Daniel Coit Gilman.

As Miller was to be the first African American student admitted to the university, the recommendation was decided by the Board of Trustees, who decided to admit Miller based on the university founder's known Quaker beliefs. From 1887 to 1889 Miller performed postgraduate work in Mathematics, Physics, and Astronomy. When an increase in tuition prevented Miller from continuing his post-graduate studies Kelly Miller taught at the M Street High School in Washington, D. C. , whose principal was Francis L. Cardozo.

He was appointed as Professor of Mathematics at Howard University in 1890. During his service there, he introduced sociology in the curriculum and gave a new dimension to the classical curriculum during his tenure as a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. His articles and essays were published in various magazines, newspapers and included in various famous books. He endorsed the concept of a symmetrical development through education, which offered both vocational and intellectual instruction. He retired as Howard University Administrator in 1935.

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