Thomas Ezekiel Miller (17 June 1849-8 April 1938) was a member of the US House of Representatives (R-SC 7) from 24 September 1890 to 3 March 1891, interrupting William Elliott's terms.
Biography[]
Thomas Ezekiel Miller was born in Ferrebeeville, South Carolina in 1849, the son of a biracial African-American woman who was the daughter of Thomas Heyward, Jr. and a wealthy young white man whose family forced him to give up his son for adoption. Miller was adopted by two freed slaves, and he was raised in Charleston before moving to Hudson, New York on the war's end. Rather than pass for white in the North, he decided to return to the American South to aid the freedmen there during Reconstruction, and he became a state legislator in 1874 and a lawyer in Beaufort in 1875. He served in the state legislature until 1880, in the State Senate from 1880 to 1882, and in the US House of Representatives from 1890 to 1891, serving only after he challenged the election results. He served as a delegate to the 1895 state constitutional convention, opposing Governor Benjamin Tillman's implementation of Jim Crow laws. During World War I, he helped to recruit 30,000 black men for the US Army, and he lived in Philadelphia from 1923 to 1934 and died in Charleston in 1938 at the age of 88.