Butler and Kelly Miller, a distinguished profes-
sor of sociology at Howard University. Professor
Miller counted among his friends and colleagues
a circle of intellectuals that included W. E. B. DU-
BOIS, BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, Carter G. Woodson,
and ALAIN LOCKE, who left an indelible impression
on the young May Miller. At Paul Laurence Dun-
bar High School, Miller studied with the promi-
nent African-American dramatist Mary Burrill
and poet ANGELINA WELD GRIMKÉ, subsequently
studying drama at Howard University, where she
received her B.A. in 1920, directing, acting, and
producing plays and collaborating with Alain
Locke and Montgomery Gregory in the founding
of a black drama movement. She did postgradu-
ate work at Columbia University and American
University; taught speech, theater, and dance at
Frederick Douglass High School, in Baltimore,
Maryland; and later was a lecturer and poet at
Monmouth College, the University of Wisconsin–
Milwaukee, and the Philips Exeter Academy. Most
of her plays were written between 1920 and 1945.
In 1942, Miller married former jazz musician Bud
Sullivan, a Washington, D.C., school principal,
and retired the following year from teaching in
order to concentrate on her writing.
A number of Miller’s early plays won drama
prizes, including Within the Shadows (which
earned an award while Miller was still an under-
graduate at Howard), Bog Guide, and The Cuss’d
Thing. Four of her plays were published in the an-
thology she edited with Willis Richardson in 1935,
Negro History in Thirteen Plays, a collection that
established firmly Miller’s national reputation.
Of these, Sojourner Truth is notable for its inclu-
sion of white characters who are changed by their
contact with a black character, but this play seems
somewhat wooden compared with the powerful
Harriet Tubman, about a spurned mulatto suitor
named Sandy who attempts to betray other slaves
in order to obtain money with which to buy his
own freedom. The plays, whose settings are in the
African Sudan (Samory) and Haiti (Christophe’s
Daughters), lack the verisimilitude of her other
work. Miller’s Ridin’ the Goat, included in Willis
Richardson’s Plays and Pageants from the Life of
the Negro (1930), subversively employs humor to
challenge the values of the black middle class and
to suggest the importance of community rituals
and cultural practices. In the play, Miller’s Aunt
Hetty speaks in the least educated vernacular of
any character in her text, yet she most represents
an Afrocentric perspective of wisdom, clarity, and
strength. Other plays include Scratches (1929),
which, like the fiction of FRANCES E. W. HARPER
before her and of ZORA NEALE HURSTON after her,
courageously tackled the taboo subject of inter-
nalized colorism and class bias within the Afri-
can-American community; Stragglers in the Dust
(1930), about African Americans in the military;
and Nails and Thorns (1933) an antilynching play
published in Lee Hamalian and James V. Hatch’s
anthology The Roots of African American Drama
(1991). Radical for their time, her plays some-
times seem dated to more recent critics and read-
ers such as DARWIN TURNER, perhaps because of
their problematic didacticism and somewhat
formal style. Nevertheless, they continue to be in-
cluded in contemporary collections of early black
theater, such as Kathy A. Perkins’s Black Female
Playwrights (1989), Elizabeth Brown-Guillory’s
Wines in the Wilderness (1990), and Hatch and
Hamalian’s anthology, as well as in Arthur P. Davis
and J. SAUNDERS REDDING’s highly regarded 1971
anthology, CAVALCADE. Brown-Guillory claims
that May Miller’s “contribution to black drama is
almost inestimable.”
The author of an uncompleted novel, Fine Mar-
ket, as well as several short stories on themes of
violence, death, sexuality, substance abuse, and
war, Miller, by the mid 1940s, devoted most of
her attention to poetry. Fairly traditional in their
form and language, Miller’s volumes of poetry
include Into the Clearing (1959), Poems (1962),
Lyrics of Three Women: Katie Lyle, Maude Rubin,
and May Miller (1964), Not That Far (1973), The
Clearing and Beyond (1974), Dust of Uncertain
Journey (1975), The Ransomed Wait (1983), and
Collected Poems (1989). The editor of Green Wind
(1978) and My World (1979), she also authored
a book of children’s poems, Halfway to the Sun
(1981). Her poems, which were influenced by theMiller, May 359