Randolph Miller and the Mysterious Missing Marker
If you lived in Chattanooga in the early 1900’s, chances are you’d heard of Randolph Miller. He was outspoken in the community, dubbed “one of the most unique characters within the bounds of the city of Chattanooga”—not to mention being one of the only former slaves in America to publish his own newspaper.
After his emancipation, Randolph Miller began his news career as a pressman, manually operating printing presses for Chattanooga’s newspapers. Having learned to read and write and developing “a love for newspaper work,” Miller set out to found his own weekly newspaper, The Blade, despite the apparent failures of others in the black community to run a successful newspaper in Chattanooga.
Undaunted, Miller pressed on with The Blade, and his style of humor and voracious honesty made him one of the most popular editors in Chattanooga. “Gems from the Blade” were published in the Chattanooga Times as well as newspapers across the country. Miller compared his paper to that of Frederick Douglass, owing Douglass’s larger success only to greater monetary support.
Beyond his work at The Blade, Randolph Miller became an early activist for civil rights. Upon the passing of the Jim Crow laws segregating Chattanooga’s streetcars, Miller staged a boycott of the streetcars by establishing a system of horse-drawn hacks to transport the black community.
The success of the hack system prompted Miller and other black business owners to attempt an entire alternate transportation system of motor cars, raising a sum of $10,000 to start. They would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling white law enforcement officials dismantling the hack system and stifling the effort to raise money for the motor cars.
I first learned of Randolph Miller’s story while researching a piece about the Lesser Known History walking tour that Chattanooga Organized for Action put on last week. The title of that tour tells a great deal about the state of Chattanooga’s black history today—lesser known.
While searching for more information on Miller, I learned that a historical marker briefly detailing his life and accomplishments once stood in front of the Bessie Smith Cultural Center. According to a Chattanooga Times Free Press article from 2015, that marker “disappeared,” but it seems more likely to have been rotated out for another segment of black history, as a marker about the old Martin Hotel stands in its place today.
Whether the marker truly mysteriously “disappeared” or was rotated out may seem inconsequential, but the perceived need to rotate who of black history gets to be immortalized and for how long speaks to a larger community issue, namely the suppression of black voices and stories in Chattanooga.
Randolph Miller’s voice was a bold one, well known by both black and white readership in Chattanooga and elsewhere in his own time. His voice will not be forgotten and his story will be told. I’ll finish this story with a call to action in Miller’s own words, straight from The Blade—“Shall we say: Let her roll? Yes, let her roll.”