Miller, Thomas Ezekiel, 1849-1938

Thomas Ezekiel Miller (June 17, 1849 – April 8, 1938) was an American educator, lawyer and politician. After being elected as a state legislator in South Carolina, he was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as disfranchisement reduced black voting. After that, no African Americans were elected from the South until 1972.

Miller was a prominent leader in the struggle for civil rights in the American South during and after Reconstruction. He was a school commissioner, state legislator, U.S. Representative, and first president of South Carolina State University, a historically black college established as a land-grant school.

Miller was born in Ferrebeeville, South Carolina, named after his adoptive mother's likely slaver. His origins were unclear although he apparently had majority European heritage. The historians Eric Foner and Stephen Middleton found that his mother was a fair-skinned mulatto daughter of Judge Thomas Heyward, Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his father a wealthy young white man, whose family rejected their relationship. They forced him to give up his son for adoption. He was adopted by former slaves Richard and Mary Ferrebee Miller, who were freed by 1850.

The boy's European appearance long prompted speculation about his paternity. In 1851, his family moved to Charleston, where Miller attended a school for free colored children. When the Civil War ended, he moved to Hudson, New York. Because of his appearance and high proportion of European ancestry, Miller could have passed for white in the North, but chose to identify as black and return to the South to help the freedmen. Receiving a scholarship, Miller attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1872.