Thomas E. Miller

Who was Thomas E. Miller?

Thomas Ezekiel Miller 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 would be 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.