Seton Hall community hosts tribute to black history professor

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SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — On Saturday, July 31, friends, family and students of Julia Gaetano Miller gathered in Jubilee Hall at Seton Hall University to remember the professor, who taught at SHU from 1970 to 1989. Miller died this past spring at age 92 from complications due to COVID-19.

After graduating from a Brooklyn high school at the age of 16, Miller enrolled at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York system. There, she was mentored by Shirley Chisholm, who later became the first black woman elected to Congress. Years later, Miller worked on Chisholm’s history-making campaign as the first African American to seek a major party bid for president of the United States. Miller later earned a master’s degree at Seton Hall and an educational doctorate at Rutgers University.

In 1967, prior to coming to Seton Hall, Miller was a research associate member of Gov. Richard Hughes’ commission to study the urban disorder and rebellions in New Jersey that year. In 1970 Seton Hall University started its Black Studies Center, with Miller as the founding associate director. Within two years she became the director. The center was a semiautonomous academic and research center devoted to the liberation of people of African descent. It had the operational authority of a school within the university’s governing structure. Many world and national leaders were honored by the center and several were awarded honorary doctorates by the university through the center; these dignitaries included Michael Manley, the prime minister of Jamaica, and Alex Haley, author of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Roots.” 

After Miller left the university in 1984, she was asked to return as a consultant to design a universitywide component for students to do volunteer work, similar to what was done within the Black Studies Center in local urban communities. Still active today, that initiative is now called D.O.V.E., the Division of Volunteer Efforts.

In 1989, Miller left Seton Hall when she received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at Wuhan University in China. Returning to the United States in 1990, she served for eight years as state director of the nonprofit organization Communities in Schools.

At the memorial, Essex County College President emeritus Zachary Yamba spoke about Miller’s extensive work in the project, where she fostered high school programs in many urban school districts that offered college scholarships to high school graduates who otherwise would likely never have attempted high education degrees programs.

A highlight of the memorial included sentiments from former students, who remembered her activism, intelligence and impact.

Photos Courtesy of Mila Jasey

  Essex County College, Newark Public Schools, Seton Hall University