Historical Marker

Randolph Miller

Chattanooga, Hamilton County · Tennessee

Miller's words survive better than most of his paper. Freed in Newton County, Georgia, on June 9, 1864, he reached Chattanooga that October and worked as a pressman, later at the Times under Adolph Ochs. His Weekly Blade, begun in 1898, ran about twelve years on blunt editorials. After the 1905 streetcar law he wrote that whites had taken Black readers' part of the library, moved the school to a frog pond and knocked Black men out of the jury box, and asked what they would do next. Only one copy is known to survive, in the state archives.

What the plaque says

Randolph Miller Randolph Miller, a former slave, came to Chattanooga in 1864 with Gen. William T. Sherman's Army. He worked as a pressman for Adolph Ochs' Daily Times until 1898 when he stared the Blade, an African-American weekly paper. With the 1905 state law segregating passengers on streetcars, Miller was one of the forces behind the streetcar boycott, and one of the originators of a system of hack lines that traveled between the city and outlying black communities.

Where it stands

35.00501, -85.32360 · Directions

Worth the stop nearby

Point Park on Lookout Mountain — 1.1 mi
The Tennessee end of Lookout Mountain, where a ten-acre Park Service memorial overlooks Moccasin Bend and the November 1863 fight called the Battle Above the Clouds.
Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 2.9 mi
Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
Ross's Landing — 3.5 mi
The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
Tennessee Aquarium — 3.6 mi
A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.

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