Hosie Miller
Age About 40
A successful Black landowner whose wife would become an activist
Baker County, Georgia
March 15, 1965
"He treated all of us like we were special."
Shirley Sherrod & Nannie Mae Jones
Daughters of Miller
START
NJ: We had a lot of memories with Daddy.
SS: He tried to teach us everything he could. I think at five years of age, I was driving the car up and down in the yard. And then at some point when he realized I could drive good, he trusted me to drive the car all the way to our grandmother’s house to take something or to pick up something.
NJ: And I remember waiting for him to come home. He would lay out on the porch and we all had a spot on his body. It was five girls. So two on the shoulders, two down on the knees. And then the baby would be right in the middle on his stomach. He treated all of us like we were special.
SS: You felt like you were the only one.
NJ: That’s right. But one day our lives changed totally because Daddy had gotten shot. He never came back home.
SS: Here we are, no means of support.
NJ: Mother couldn’t do anything for us because she was seven months pregnant, bedridden. So we had to assume a lot of responsibility with feeding the cows and feeding the hogs, try to hoe the cotton.
SS: After Daddy’s death, you felt you needed to do something.
NJ: We started the civil rights movement in Baker County. We started voter’s registration. We did mass meetings. There were white and black students from all over the country that came to Baker County. We would lead marches during the day and they just loaded us all up in the paddy wagons and took us to jail. We stayed in jail for a whole week. But that never stopped us because we had this inner strength that we had developed.
SS: We brought change to Baker County. The Voting Rights Act passed in August of 1965. And in September I could walk in and register to vote. Just 11 years later, our mother became one of the first Black elected officials in Baker County.
NJ: I tell my kids the story, my grandkids know the story. I just keep it alive that way.
SS: It has helped me through the years to be able to talk about what happened. I can’t go through one day, not one day, without thinking about Daddy or without using some of the lessons that he passed on to us. I just wish a lot of kids could have that experience of having someone who had the ability to make every child that he had feel special. That was a gift.
NJ: Yeah. That was Daddy.
END
Photo by Michael Reese Studios
Hosie Miller, a successful Black landowner, business person, farmer and deacon, was shot by a white neighbor over a dispute about wandering cattle. Miller had five daughters and a sixth child on the way when he was killed.
Both Miller and his white neighbor, Cal Hall Jr., kept several cows on their properties, and at some point, a handful of Hall’s cows wandered onto Miller’s land, according to a Department of Justice memo on the case. On March 15, 1965, Hall and another man came onto the Miller property and attempted to take one of Miller’s cows. When Miller objected, Hall shot him. Miller’s brother drove him to a nearby hospital; he was later transferred to a larger hospital. Ten days after being shot, Miller died.
Initial Investigation
According to the DOJ’s memo, local law enforcement took little interest in investigating the case. Miller’s widow, Grace Miller, later described Baker County Sheriff Gator Johnson as a “mean man” who refused to help Black residents. While a local judge issued a warrant for Hall’s arrest, there are conflicting reports as to whether the case was ever sent to a grand jury. The DOJ memo cites a 2010 Albany Herald article stating that Hall was charged for the killing, on October 27, 1965, but a grand jury declined to indict him.
Grace later filed a wrongful death suit in civil court. Hall responded to the complaint by stating he had killed Miller in self-defense. The county was majority Black, but its jury lists were mostly white; Miller’s attorney, the famed civil rights lawyer C.B. King, asked the court to redraw the jury lists to be less disproportionate, but the court refused. The jury ruled in Hall’s favor.
Grace became a civil rights leader in Georgia, organizing protests and marches after her husband’s death. She became one of the first Black elected officials in Baker County.
Till Act Status
In 2010, the FBI opened an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Miller’s death. Local officials told the FBI they had no files pertaining to the shooting. The agency interviewed a friend of both Miller and Hall; this person professed to being very surprised upon hearing Hall had shot Miller, because Miller “was very nice and polite.” The interviewee, whose identity is redacted in the DOJ memo, concurred with Grace that Sheriff Johnson was mean and unfair to his Black constituency, as well as to poor white people, and said Hall had confessed to killing Miller over the cattle.
Citing the death of the shooter as well as a statute of limitations, the Department of Justice closed the case in 2011.
Case Status closed
Closed 06/21/2011
Themes
- Closed All Subjects Deceased
- Closed Cases
- Men
- Storycorps Stories
About the Project
This multiplatform investigation draws upon more than two years of reporting, thousands of documents and dozens of first-hand interviews. FRONTLINE spoke to family and friends of the victims, and witnesses, some of whom had never been interviewed; current and former Justice Department officials and FBI agents, state and local law enforcement; lawmakers, civil-rights leaders and investigative journalists, to explore the Department of Justice’s reopening of civil rights-era cold cases under the 2008 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
In addition to an examination of the federal effort, the project features the first comprehensive, interactive list of all those whose cases were reopened by the Department of Justice. Today, the list stands at 151 names. Among the victims: voting rights advocates, veterans, Louisville’s first female prosecutor, business owners, mothers, fathers, and children.
The project consists of a web-based interactive experience, serialized podcast, a touring augmented-reality exhibit, documentary and companion education curriculum for high schools and universities.
A project like Un(re)solved would not be possible without the historic and contemporary contributions of universities, civil rights groups, and the press, particularly the Black press, who have ensured the ongoing public record of racist violence in the United States. To pay homage to these groups, the web interactive begins with a quote from journalist, activist and researcher Ida B. Wells, one of the first to document with precision the horrors of racial terror in America. “The way to right wrongs,” she wrote, “is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
At the outset of the project, FRONTLINE forged a relationship with Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), bringing them on as an academic partner. Launched in 2007 by Distinguished Law Professor Margaret Burnham, CRRJ is a mission-driven program of interdisciplinary teaching, research and policy analysis on race, history, and criminal justice. Their work has expanded beyond the names on the Justice Department’s list, archiving documents in over 1,000 cases of racially motivated homicides.
With support from the CRRJ, FRONTLINE reporters gathered what could be known about the individuals on the list, conducting interviews with family, friends and witnesses, delving into newspaper archives and gathering documentation including headstone applications, draft cards and archival photographs.
At the heart of the project has been a drive to center the voices of the families of those on the list. FRONTLINE partnered with StoryCorps to record nearly two dozen oral histories with victims’ next of kin, which are featured both in the web-based interactive and traveling AR exhibit. These oral histories will also be archived in the National Library of Congress.
To lead the creative vision for the web experience and installation, FRONTLINE partnered with Ado Ato Pictures, a premier mixed reality studio founded by artist, filmmaker, and technologist Tamara Shogaolu.
Shogaolu rooted the visuals in the powerful symbolism of trees. In the United States, trees evoke the ideal of liberty, but also speak to an oppressive history of racially motivated violence. In Persian myth, trees are humanity’s ancestors, while in Toraja, Indonesia, they serve as sacred burial sites.
“I was really inspired by looking at the role of the tree as a symbol in American history” Shogaolu said. “It’s been looked at as a symbol of freedom, we look at it as a connector between generations, and also there’s the association of trees with racial terror.” When designing the creative vision for Un(re)solved Shogaolu wondered whether she might be able to reclaim the symbol of the tree. “As a person of color, we’re often terrified of being in isolated places in the woods. And I thought it was kind of crazy that there are natural environments that instinctually give great fear because of this connection with racial terror and I wanted to reclaim that — to turn these into beautiful spaces.”
Un(re)solved weaves imagery of trees, which also recall family ties, into patterns and textures from the American tradition of quilting. Among enslaved African Americans forbidden to read or write, quilts provided an important space to document family stories. Today, quilting remains a creative outlet rich with story and tradition for many American communities.
We invite you to enter this forest of quilted memories — a testimony to the lives of these individuals, and the multi-generational impact of their untimely, unjust loss.
(Credits to come)