Thomas E. Miller: A Life in Service to Civil Rights

The adopted son of a freed slave, Thomas E. Miller, a light-complexioned black who might have “passed for white” in the North, chose to spend most of his adult life in his native state of South Carolina, where he served as a black champion of civil rights in the turbulent fifty years that followed the Civil War. Those decades, which spanned the Reconstruction, “Redeemer,” and Jim Crow eras of Southern history, found him serving in the South Carolina general assembly and senate, and for a brief time in 1890 in the U.S. House of Representatives. One of a handful of black delegates elected to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention in 1895, Miller spoke and voted against the white supremacist-dominated convention’s insertion of poll taxes and literacy tests for voting in the state’s new Jim Crow constitution. For reasons that remain unclear, Miller and his wife, Anna, in or around 1921, chose to move north to Philadelphia and the Powelton neighborhood, where they lived for about a decade with their daughter Pansy and her husband, Dr. Charles W. Maxwell, at 3405 Hamilton Street.  In the early 1930s, the Millers returned to South Carolina, where they lived out their final years.