Race Adjustment

A Selection

By Kelly Miller

Mathematician, sociologist, and leading Black intellectual Kelly Miller presents a compelling series of essays addressing the systemic racial injustices of his time. Advocating for self-empowerment and strategic advancement, Miller’s work offers prescient critiques of inequality and forward-thinking solutions that remain deeply resonant in ongoing conversations about race and justice.

$18.00

ISBN: 9781967190065
ebook ISBN: 9781967190072
On Sale: September 30, 2025
Pages: 160

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Race Adjustment

Overview

Before Martin, before Malcolm—before Du Bois and Garvey sharpened their ideological blades—there was Kelly Miller. A pioneering mathematician, sociologist, and columnist, Miller was one of the most widely read Black intellectuals of the early twentieth century. Race Adjustment, first published in 1908, stood as his response to the tumult of Jim Crow America—a fiery, clear-eyed set of essays that refused to choose sides between Booker T. Washington’s cautious pragmatism and W.E.B. Du Bois’s elite-driven activism.

Collected here with a trenchant new introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway, this volume restores Miller to his rightful p lace as the intellectual center of gravity in a period of radical transition. His critiques of political cowardice, economic exploitation, and the hypocrisies of American democracy ring out with undiminished power. Written from the “middle ground,” Miller’s words carried far and wide—from the pages of the Black press to the corridors of power. This selection reveals a moral voice unafraid to indict injustice wherever it appeared—and to ask, over a century later: Has the nation truly adjusted?

 

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Race Adjustment: A Selection (1908)
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Mathematician, sociologist, and leading Black intellectual Kelly Miller presents a compelling series of essays addressing the systemic racial injustices of his time. Advocating for self-empowerment and strategic advancement, Miller’s work offers prescient critiques of inequality and forward-thinking solutions that remain deeply resonant in ongoing conversations about race and justice.    Learn more

 
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About the Author

Kelly Miller (1863–1939) was a pioneering African American intellectual, mathematician, and sociologist. As a longtime professor and dean at Howard University, he became a lead-ing public voice on race, education, and civil rights. A prolific essayist, Miller advocated for reasoned reform and interracial cooperation in works like Race Adjustment (1908), shaping early twentieth-century Black political thought.

Jonathan Scott Holloway is a historian and president and CEO of the Luce Foundation. He previously served as president of Rutgers University (2020–2025), provost at Northwestern University, and dean of Yale College. He is the author of The Cause of Freedom, Jim Crow Wisdom, and Confronting the Veil, works that explore African American history, memory, and political thought in the twentieth century.

Kelly Miller
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