news-record.com

GREENSBORO — Three years before the 1960 Woolworth sit-ins, Rodney Jaye Miller staged his own sit-down.

A white man, Miller took a seat and opened a textbook in a classroom at previously all-black N.C. A&T.

Unlike the four black A&T students refused service when they sat at the whites-only Woolworth lunch counter, Miller was not asked to leave the university.

He became the first white student to enroll at A&T, which was founded in 1891 for black students. He was also, according to news accounts of the time, the first white student in North Carolina to be admitted to a state-supported black university.

In January 1957, Miller was an engineering student at N.C. State in Raleigh.

He and his then-wife decided to live that summer in Greensboro, their hometown. He planned to work at his parents’ business, but he also wanted to take summer engineering courses available only at A&T.

He applied after he and his wife became friends at St. Benedict’s Catholic Church with two A&T professors. One was black, and the other was from India.

The professors went to A&T’s president (the office is now chancellor), Warmoth Gibbs, who gave his blessing to Miller’s admission.

Miller found A&T students and professors welcoming, his former wife, Elizabeth Sparger Burke, recalls.

“We really didn’t think it was all that big of a deal until the repercussions started,” she says. “We were shocked it caused such an uproar.”

Burke and Miller divorced in 1964. She later remarried but stayed friends with Miller until his death at age 62 in 2002.

The backlash about his admission to A&T came after the local press published a story about Miller’s historic action. The story went nationwide over the news wire services and was mentioned on the “CBS Evening News.”

Burke says the ugly calls and letters invaded the couple’s home. A letter from Mississippi was so threatening the Millers turned it over to the authorities.

“It scared me, and I was mad,” Burke says. “Even back then, I was for equal rights for black people. My husband felt the same way.”

Despite the couple’s beliefs, Burke says Miller’s A&T enrollment wasn’t meant as a moral or political statement. He needed courses; A&T had them.

Miller later returned to N.C. State, but he didn’t graduate. The couple moved back to Greensboro, where Miller worked for the Lennox heating and air-conditioning franchise his family owned. He spent most of his life in that line of work.

Elizabeth Burke, a nurse, worked here for local doctors and later spent 32 years in New York City as an X-ray technician. She now lives in Florida.

The Millers’ son, Eric Miller of Myrtle Beach, S.C., said in an e-mail after the opening of the International Civil Rights Center & Museum, that his father was worthy of public attention for integrating A&T’s student body. (The school did have white professors).

Eric Miller said he has always been proud his father did what few people at the time would have even considered.

Neither A&T nor N.C. State was mentioned in Miller’s obituary. But, his son said, his father’s A&T enrollment was saluted at his funeral.

Elizabeth Burke says she remains politically liberal. Her former husband became a conservative, she says, but his belief in racial equality didn’t waver.

“Looking back,” she says, “I think it was very brave of him to do what he did” 53 years ago.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@ clearwire.net