This is the 11th in a series
of profiles that chronicle Alexandria's Living Legends,
people who are today's history makers. Living Legends of
Alexandria is a joint project of the Rotary Club of
Alexandria and the Alexandria Gazette Packet. Conceived
and directed by Nina Tisara, it is designed as an
ongoing project to identify and honor those individuals
whose vision and dedication make a tangible difference
to the quality of life in Alexandria. For more
information or to nominate a Legend for next year's
program, visit www.tisaraphoto.com/legends.
Eula
and Melvin Miller have spent more than 50 years making
Alexandria a better place to live. His contributions
began with civil rights law and came to focus on housing
for minority and lower-income people. Hers focused on
improving the education and skills of young children and
their caregivers. Both were driven by a strong sense of
justice and equality.
The Millers have lived in
Alexandria since January 1958. They had been married
here the year before, choosing the city as a meeting
place between his Army posting in Philadelphia and her
home in North Carolina. When he got out of the Army,
Melvin Miller, who had graduated from Howard University
Law School in 1955, was looking for a place to practice
law, and as he had passed the Virginia Bar Exam, Eula
Miller suggested they try the city where they had
married.
Melvin Miller hung out his shingle on a
room upstairs from a drugstore at the corner of Alfred
and Queen streets. He started with criminal law
practice, but soon became involved in civil rights
activism, doing pro bono work on school desegregation
issues, though not as an attorney of record, and helping
those involved with the Arlington lunch counter sit-ins
in the early 1960s. He became active in Alexandria city
issues, like housing, that affected African Americans.
"I think everybody has a code they live by, and
I still have that," Eula Miller said recently. She had
her first major insight into the need to fight injustice
when she worked in an Atlantic City hotel between her
junior and senior years of college. Her job was helping
the head housekeeper check the quality of the maids’
work, inspecting rooms after they were cleaned. One day
she saw that the maids had to eat lunch outside at the
back of the hotel in the summer heat. She worked in an
air-conditioned office. At 19, she reacted fiercely to
the injustice, urging them to strike for the right to
eat indoors. "Somebody squealed," she said, "and I got
fired. I called my daddy. His response was that I
clearly needed a good education."
Melvin Miller
explained his long pursuit of affordable and accessible
housing: "I’ve always felt that in this city, with all
the good intentions people have — when it comes down to
housing the poor, it’s too easy to do nothing."
THE MILLERS THEMSELVES had encountered
difficulties finding a place to live within the city
limits when they arrived here, first renting a room in a
teacher’s home. "You couldn’t rent an apartment outside
the African American community. Most teachers, lawyers
and doctors who served this community lived outside the
city limits in Fairfax or D.C. and commuted," recalled
Melvin Miller. In his legal and volunteer work, he
pursued equity and justice in all areas affecting the
civil rights of individuals, but gradually housing
issues came to dominate his life, both professionally
and in his civic and volunteer work.
Melvin
Miller was born in Savannah, Ga., but moved as an infant
to Haddonfield, N.J.. He graduated from high school at
16. A bright student, he’d not always seen the purpose
of academic striving. A job stocking shelves in a
grocery store quickly showed him the value of higher
education. Then he heard about St. Augustine’s College
in Raleigh, N.C., where tuition was $60 a semester and
room and board was $30 a month, including laundry. He
figured he could handle that. "It was the first place
where people made me think I could do something
meaningful," Melvin Miller remembered. He has since
encouraged many young Alexandrians to attend the same
school, where he has served on the board of trustees and
acted as interim president for seven months in 1999
while the board searched for a new president.
Eula Miller was born in Maxton, N.C. in 1933 and
graduated from Bennett College in Greensboro in 1953.
She later earned a master’s degree in education from the
George Washington University. She taught school in
Charlotte, N.C., before her marriage, and again here in
Alexandria afterward, but stopped for a while when the
couple’s three children came along. When she went back
to teaching, she focused on early childhood. She saw
that some children were less well prepared than others,
so she started tutoring programs to help make up the
differences, enlisting the city’s middle class
professionals to help.
She saw a need for better
skills and education for caregivers. By the early 1970s,
she had become a liaison between the Alexandria public
schools and the new Northern Virginia Community College
(NOVA), working to put together a degree program for
classroom instructional aides. Originally, she had meant
to return to the Alexandria school system, but by the
time the program was in place, she decided to stay at
NOVA, where she eventually became head of the Early
Childhood Education Program, a position she still holds.
Angie Godfrey, a former school board member and
director of Alexandria’s Head Start program, remembers
Eula Miller as someone "who will work with anyone and
everyone. She has such a vision and a sense of how to
support and grow families in a community." Eula Miller
also organized a program to help Head Start families
make the transition to kindergarten.
ONE OF
HER GREATEST successes was a program for teenage
mothers that provided daycare so they could attend
classes to study early childhood education. The goal was
to teach them better parenting skills, but also to give
them the training for careers as childcare providers,
enabling them to achieve and to care for their own
children. Some went on to further education, including
4-year colleges.
"She willed those kids to
succeed," said Suzanne Chis, Alexandria’s director of
Social Services, who has worked with Eula Miller for
many years. One of their early efforts was the City’s
day care center, which in the early ‘80s did not have
credentialed caregivers. Eula Miller’s efforts helped
turn the center around by helping provide staff training
through the programs at NOVA. While some staffers
resisted change at first, Chis said, Eula Miller’s
positive outlook provided a circle of reinforcement that
encouraged people to grow and brought about positive
change. It was the first center for low-income children
in the country to receive national accreditation.
Carol Farrell, director of the Office for Early
Childhood Development in the Department of Human
Services, also has worked with Eula Miller for years and
watched her design the courses and open up ways to make
the collaboration with NOVA work. "Her goal is to break
down barriers to achieve what’s best for children," said
Farrell. "The core of what she’s done is her
willingness, her passion, her advocacy for children and
their caregivers and mothers."
Farrell and Chis
both note that the story continues. NOVA still maintains
a Head Start classroom and playground on the campus that
serves city residents. Three years ago, when the city
identified a need to provide more training for English
language learners who work as caregivers, Eula Miller
helped develop a program that combined interpretation
and specialized language training with a focus on early
childhood education. While learning English, they were
also taught better classroom and childcare practices.
Back when the Millers were starting their
family, it became clear that pro bono civil rights cases
weren’t going to pay the bills, and Melvin Miller took a
job as an attorney at the Federal Housing
Administration, the predecessor to today’s Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Ultimately, he
became director of HUD’s Metropolitan Washington Office.
He quit HUD in 1969, but returned in 1977 as a deputy
undersecretary in the Carter administration. He retired
from the agency in 1997.
EARLY ON, Melvin
Miller’s civil rights activism led him to become a
member of a group of Alexandria African Americans who
met regularly to study issues affecting their community
and work to improve the situation. The group was called
the Secret Seven. "We didn’t give ourselves that name,"
he said. We were actually eight. We think it was an FBI
informer who named us after infiltrating the group," he
said. "Nobody was in charge, but we agreed we would have
one spokesperson. I was mostly that person."
The
group always met at 10 p.m. or later, Melvin Miller
recalled. "We pledged to be available to help each other
and discuss critical issues at any time of day or night,
by phone or in person. But we also socialized, sometimes
gathering with our wives, not talking business."
The members became active in the political
process, interviewing candidates who were willing.
Because many of them were federal employees restricted
by the Hatch Act, which limited political activities of
government workers, they would ask other prominent
members of the community to endorse candidates based on
the research of the Secret Seven.
Melvin Miller
unsuccessfully ran for City Council in 1963 and for
mayor in 1976, but felt it was important to challenge
the system and set a precedent for African Americans. He
was appointed to the Alexandria Housing and
Redevelopment Authority (ARHA) in 1970, serving as chair
until 1977, when he returned to HUD. Miller was a member
of the School Board from 1986 to 1993, serving as chair
from 1990 to 1992. He was appointed to the State Council
of Higher Education by Gov. Linwood Holton in 1971. He
served for eight years.
Melvin Miller is
proudest of his work in the 1970s, when he, George Cook,
Wiley Mitchell and Ira Robinson sat down in Mitchell’s
kitchen and drafted a resolution that led to an
agreement between the City and ARHA that no public
housing in the city would be destroyed unless there was
a provision for one-for-one replacement. Though modified
somewhat in the 1980s to allow "publicly assisted" units
that were not directly public housing, that agreement
still underlies the City’s housing policy, he said.
Melvin Miller was reappointed to the ARHA board
in 2000 and has been chair since 2001. Connie Ring,
another ARHA board member, said Miller’s strength has
been his ability to look at ARHA development projects
and come up with a viable way to redevelop
neighborhoods. For example, doing the Glebe Park and
Bland projects together worked because of the high land
value in the Bland neighborhood, which saved city
taxpayers money. The combination of replacement public
housing with market value housing has made the whole
project economically feasible, Ring said. The project
was approved on Oct. 18, 2008.
"Except for the
determination, skills and perseverance of Melvin, I
don’t think we would have been able to get the whole
project through City Council. Of course Council and
other civic leaders contributed a lot to the process,
but the one person who was indispensable was Melvin."
Ring also remembers Melvin Miller’s contribution
to civil rights efforts in years past, and remembers
Eula Miller cooking breakfast for some of their
gatherings at the Miller home.
Ferdinand Day
cited Melvin Miller’s time as a spokesman for the Secret
Seven, and called him "a trusted friend for a half
century. As a civil rights attorney, he inspired and
provided courageous leadership to generations in search
of justice and equality."
Former School Board
member Shirley Tyler said she relied on Melvin Miller
for advice and counsel for many years. She appreciated
his insights on education, but also on public housing
issues. Tyler said she thinks Alexandria’s housing
policies have been more successful than in other places.
"Small clusters give a sense of community," she said.
She also cited the importance of residents’ "sense that
people like Melvin were on their side and looking out
for their interests." She believes that scattered site
housing has been a positive development.
The
Millers had three children, one of whom is deceased.
They are proud that their children were educated at
Amherst, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, and the
George Washington School of Law. All four of their
grandchildren live in Alexandria within minutes of their
grandparents’ home. Their children explain the return to
Alexandria after their schooling this way: "We like
home."
By Christa Watters
For the
Gazette Packet