Photo by Brandon Dill
Andrea Miller
Dr. Andrea Miller remembers her parents attending Dr. Martin Luther King’s last speech before he was assassinated the following day at the Lorraine Motel — two miles from the campus of LeMoyne-Owen College, where she was later to study. Miller grew up in South Memphis and is now president of LeMoyne-Owen, the historically black four-year college in north South Memphis.
But what she remembers most vividly from that Southern springtime are the riots. “Seeing the National Guard and the tanks ride around in my community: I remember that. That felt very odd, very strange. It didn’t seem real — it reminded me of what you see on TV.”
Miller, a trained biologist — after LeMoyne, she received a doctorate in molecular biology at what is now Clark Atlanta University — approached her world, growing up, with a child’s innocence but a scientist’s inquisitiveness. When her father brought her and her brother to the movie at the old Malco Movie Theatre (today, The Orpheum), Miller remembers coming in through a side door. “I used to say to my father,” she recalls, “‘How do the white people get downstairs?’”
She asked her mother why no one else was in the doctor’s waiting room: Her mother offered only that the other patients were in a different room. And at the old Southgate Woolco department store, “We always wanted to get milkshakes, something to drink, and my mom would say, ‘Just go to the register — don’t sit at the stools.’” Miller didn’t know why.
As she grew older, her questioning grew more insistent, the realities of racism more glaring. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked. Miller’s parents answered: “You would eventually learn what was happening. But you would be old enough to understand that it has absolutely nothing to do with you.”
Attending historically black schools throughout her own education, Miller believes, contributed to her success not only as a student but as a confident, self-aware person. When she was an undergraduate, in the late 1970s, the Civil Rights movement was not long in the rearview mirror, and so, she says, “It was a good place to be — to reaffirm who you are as a person and to have people who look just like you, and who are doing wonderful things.” The same philosophy holds true on the LeMoyne campus today.
Miller has long wondered about her family’s origin. Neither of her parents could share much history with her — not beyond a few generations. Years ago, working late one night in a campus computer lab in Cincinnati, a foreign student asked her where she was from. “I’m from Memphis,” she answered. No, but where were you from before? “From Memphis,” she repeated. Well, where were your parents from? “Memphis.”
“But where are you from, from?” Miller remembers being asked. “I said, I don’t have any idea.” For a time, whenever she met anyone from any country in Africa, Miller would inquire: Look at my face; look at my features — where do you think I’m from? Senegal, Ethiopia? “I could barely tell anybody about my great-grandparents.”
She sees part of the role of the historically black college to be filling in the gaps — if not individually, then collectively. From enslavement through the struggle of the Civil Rights movement, “it hasn’t been that long ago, and we have to make sure they understand that.”
Once equipped with a deep and broad understanding of history, students will be uniquely prepared to continue the work previous generations began, Miller says. “Here we are, right in the middle of Memphis,” she explains, “in 38126, one of the poorest ZIP codes in the city of Memphis. Most of our students are coming from Shelby County Schools.”
If any college is positioned to prepare teachers for the students and the system they’ll encounter, Miller says, it should be LeMoyne. “If we don’t get it, if we don’t understand, who will?”
That’s why the college is developing a “center of excellence” in urban teacher education.
They’re also undergoing an extensive certification process to open a center of excellence devoted to cybersecurity. A professor on the faculty has the right background, and the new center would create new opportunities for students at the college. And, being located in Memphis, close to Soulsville and Stax, Miller says LeMoyne is on track to create a center of music, arts, and culture, too.
When she entered LeMoyne-Owen as a student, Miller says, she and most of her peers “came from stable homes, where we had a mother and a father.” Today, many of the college’s students arrive on campus having grown up in homes “where their parents were not much older than they are. They’re experiencing and being exposed to all kinds of things that I never was exposed to.” Understanding the students — the whole students, not solely their classroom selves — has grown even more vital. “That’s what makes us so different from majority institutions,” says Miller. “We understand where are students are coming from.”
She sees how the world around her has operated, but she’s not content to watch it stay that way. Andrea Miller will tell you she gets that approach from growing up during the Civil Rights movement in Memphis.
“Are we a lot better off?” she asks. “Some say we are; some say a little. The movement had a lot of impact on my thinking and my feeling that I’m not limited by anything or anyone, except maybe myself. So many people before us fought for us to have these rights. I do feel a sense of responsibility to that movement, and to the community.”
