The Women We Knew, The Women We know--COME CELEBRATE THEM!

LITERARY historians have seemed intent on depriving Washington, DC of its legacy. Many African American writers whose careers first began in the nation’s capital frequently have been described exclusively as members of the Harlem Renaissance. May Miller (Sullivan) is one such individual, although she was born in the city and spent a significant amount of her life in the District of Columbia.

Miller developed her interest in creative writing under the tutelage of her father, Kelly Miller, an author, philosopher, professor of sociology and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University—among the first African Americans hired on the faculty. “I recited lines from poetry before I knew about the importance of either the writer or what he had written.

“My father would recite one line and my sister and I would recite the next,” Miller said during a 1981 interview with The Institute for the Preservation and Study of African American Writing. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but those recitations probably made more impact than I can assess.”

Growing up on the campus of Howard University, then known as the Capstone of Negro Education, meant there were always activities and people impacting Miller’s life. She was introduced to artists and intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and for a time, Paul Laurence Dunbar was a guest at the family’s home. Langston Hughes was one of her personal and literary friends.

Miller began writing her own poetry when she was around six years old and was first published at 13 in The School Progress magazine.

She received a check for twenty-five cents.

After graduating from the famed M Street School, later named Dunbar High School, Miller enrolled at 16 years old in Howard University, continuing her literary focus. She was immersed in an environment that included some of the most accomplished African Americans writers of her day. For example, The Stylus student literary group had been created in 1916 by Montgomery Gregory, a leader of the National Negro Theater Movement and founder of the famed Howard Players, and Alain Leroy Locke, considered by some to have been the Dean of The Harlem Renaissance. Locke was also the first Black Rhodes Scholar from the United States.

An original manuscript had to be submitted and evaluated to be accepted in The Stylus. “I sent them a short story I had written,” Miller told IPSAAW. She had already begun writing plays. It would be years before she turned her attention to writing for children.

Langston Hughes

Miller graduated from Howard at the top of her class in 1920 and later studied poetry and drama at American University and Columbia University. Even before then, she had begun to claim her space in the city’s literary stage. In 1914, The Washington Post published her short story “Wireless in Squirreldom.”

In 1925, like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Contee Cullen, Miller won the “Opportunity” magazine award; she was selected third place in drama; given the competition, it was an impressive showing. She told the Post’s Isabel Wilkerson in 1982 that after the ceremony, “we all went down to the Greenwich Village and had a bang-up time. I can see Zora now, in that rapture-red shawl.”

Miller eventually returned to Washington, DC and married John “Bud” Sullivan, a high school principal; the wedding was held in the family’s home on Howard’s campus. (They remained married for 41 years, until his death in 1982.)

That wasn’t the end of her literary pursuits or escapades. Miller recalled in her interview with Wilkerson the last time she saw Hughes. “It was in 1963 and we had just come back from a ceremony at the Library of Congress. He was the life of the party. He had charisma, all right.”

Miller taught for 20 years at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore, commuting daily. A medical condition forced her to retire in 1945. She also had been a lecturer or writer-in residence at several schools and colleges, including the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Monmouth College and Phillips Exeter Academy.

Georgia Douglas Johnson--founder/host of S Street Saturday Night Salons

In the 1960s, she turned her attention to Washington, DC’s children and the city’s arts community. She met frequently with young writers, including the cofounders of IPSAAW, jonetta rose barras and Sheila Crider, at her apartment at 16th and S Streets Northwest. Ironically, Miller lived only a few blocks away from where Georgia Douglas Johnson had held her famous Saturday Night Salons that Miller often attended.

During her productive career, Miller served as the poetry coordinator for Friends of the Arts in the DC Public Schools. She chaired the literature panel of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She also served on the Poetry Committee at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In 1977, she read her poetry during the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter. In 1981, she published a book of children’s poetry Halfway to the Sun, after having other poems appear in various anthologies.

Miller energetically embraced her opportunity to groom a new class of writers, ensuring that the children of the city were learning to write poetry and plays. She helped secure funding through the DC Commission on the Arts for writers’ in-residence programs at many schools, particularly those east of the Anacostia River.

She received recognition from several groups including The Howard University alumni Achievement Award. In 1986, IPSAAW presented her with its coveted Preservation Award; Eloise Greenfield and Lucille Clifton also had been recipients. When Miller died in 1995, then U.S. Rep. the Honorable Donald Payne (New Jersey Democrat) read her achievements into the “Congressional Record” from the House floor.