CBH Talk | Say His Name, Arthur Miller: A Death by Police Chokehold 45 Years Ago
On June 14, 1978, Arthur Miller, a Black Crown Heights businessman, was killed by police chokehold. Miller was a respected and much-loved community leader. The calls for justice following his death echo today, 45 years later, a somber forerunner to the Movement for Black Lives.
Join us for a commemorative discussion with those who remember along with leading experts. Pastor and civil rights activist Reverend Herbert Daughtry, who led protests after Miller’s death is joined by Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men, MSNBC contributor, and leading expert on racially motivated police brutality, Elizabeth Hinton, national authority on criminalization and racist policing and author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, leading scholar of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. NY1’s Errol Louis leads the discussion which remembers Miller’s life and legacy, retells the tragic history, and turns to the widespread racist policing that continues to plague us today.
Special thanks to Arthur Miller's daughters, LoLisa Miller-Bradford and Vallorie Miller, founders of the Arthur Miller Jr., A Daugher Never Forgets Foundation, for their partnership. Join them and Reverend Daughtry for a day of remembrance at The House of the Lord, 415 Atlantic Avenue, Saturday June 17, 9 am - 4 pm. Find out more here.
Participants
Paul Butler is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University Law Center, a legal analyst on MSNBC, and a contributing opinion writer for The Washington Post. He is one of the nation’s most frequently consulted scholars on issues of race and criminal justice. His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and The ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News.
Professor Butler’s scholarship has been published in leading scholarly journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. He was awarded Professor of the Year three times by the Georgetown graduating class and received the 2021-22 Frank F. Flagel Teaching Award, the law school’s top teaching honor.
His book Chokehold: Policing Black Men was published in July 2017. The Washington Post named it one of the 50 best non-fiction books of 2017. Chokehold was also named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The New York Times described Chokehold as the best book on criminal justice reform since The New Jim Crow. It was a finalist for the 2018 NAACP Image Award for best non-fiction. Professor Butler’s earlier book Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice received the Harry Chapin Media award.
Earlier, Professor Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. His prosecutions included a United States Senator, three FBI agents, and several other law enforcement officials. He is a graduate of Yale University, cum laude, and Harvard Law School, cum laude.
The Reverend Dr. Herbert Daughtry hails from a family which has produced five generations of Black church leaders. Born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised on the streets of Brooklyn and Jersey City, Reverend Daughtry has risen to positions of national and international prominence.
The National Presiding Bishop Emeritus of The House of the Lord Churches, among Reverend Daughtry’s leadership roles are Founding Chairman of the New York Black United Front; Founding Chairman of the National Black United Front; Founder and President of the African People’s Christian Organization; and more recently, founder of the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, an organization created in support of Brooklyn residents affected by the Atlantic Yards Project. More than 65 years of involvement in church and community service as a pastor, activist, organizer, humanitarian, and author, have earned him the title, “The People’s Pastor.”
Reverend Daughtry’s long career of activism began with the civil rights struggles in the 1950s, working in collaboration with Brooklyn CORE and Operation Breadbasket, and continuing with his participation in the fight for community control of schools in the late 1960s. In 1976, as a result of the killing of 15-year-old Randolph Evans by a New York City police officer, Reverend Daughtry became a major force in organizing the Coalition of Concerned Leaders and Citizens to Save Our Youth. He was among the protest leaders who led rallies and marches in response to Arthur Miller’s killing in 1978.
Dr. Daughtry was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam and a leading voice in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, a role acknowledged by honor of being invited to participate in the funeral of Nelson Mandela. Of the seventeen member clergy participating, Reverend Daughtry and Reverend Jesse Jackson were the only two who were not South African.
Dr. Daughtry has spoken on numerous occasions at United Nations subcommittee meetings regarding South African apartheid, Cuba, the Middle East, and the state of U.S. civil rights. He has led innumerable delegations in travel around the world in the ongoing struggle for global human rights and self-determination.
Reverend Daughtry is married to Reverend Dr. Karen Smith Daughtry. They have four adult children, Leah, Sharon, Dawnique, and Herbert, Jr; three grandsons, Lorenzo, Herbert III, and Myles; a great-granddaughter, Lauren Joy, and great-grandson, Alexander.
Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University. Considered one of the nation’s leading experts on criminalization and policing, Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States.
In her first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies and laid the groundwork for the expansion of U.S. policing and prison regimes. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime received numerous awards and recognition, including the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her recent book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (Liveright 2021), won a Robert F. Kennedy book award. America on Fire provides a new framework for understanding the problem of police abuse and the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color in post-civil rights America. Both From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and American on Fire were named New York Times Notable books.
Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. A Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation Fellow, Hinton completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013.
Her articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of Nature, Science, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries is associate professor of history at the Ohio State University where he has been teaching courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement for the last twenty years.
He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, and the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, which won the 2020 James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association for the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. He also wrote and narrated the 10-episode Audible Original series Great Figures of the Civil Rights Movement, which was released in February 2020.
Dr. Jeffries served as the lead historian for the five-year, $25 million renovation of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He is also the host of the podcast Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a production of the Teaching Tolerance division of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Dr. Jeffries earned a BA in history from Morehouse College in 1994 and a PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University in 2002.
Errol Louis is the Political Anchor of Spectrum News NY1, where he hosts Inside City Hall, a nightly prime-time show that focuses on New York politics. He regularly interviews top political and cultural leaders, and has moderated more than two dozen debates, including the race for mayor, public advocate, city and state comptroller, state Attorney General and the U.S. Senate. He also was a panelist in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate in Brooklyn between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
In 2019 he launched a popular weekly podcast, You Decide with Errol Louis, that features longer discussions with political and cultural figures including ex-President Bill Clinton; playwright Aaron Sorkin; actors Edward Norton and Brian Cox; and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Prior to joining Spectrum News NY1, Louis served on the Daily News' editorial board, and he still pens weekly opinion columns for the newspaper. He also hosted a weekday talk show on AM1600 WWRL.
Louis is a longtime CNN Contributor, providing on-air commentary on key events including presidential primaries and Election Night. He writes regularly for CNN.com, as well as a weekly column for New York Magazine on a range of political and social affairs. Additionally, Louis is an adjunct professor of Urban Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Louis graduated from Harvard College a B.A. in Government. He also earned an M.A. in Political Science from Yale University and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Juanita Scarlett, and their son Noah.
On June 14, 1978, Arthur Miller, a Black Crown Heights businessman, was killed by police chokehold. Miller was a respected and much-loved community leader. The calls for justice following his death echo today, 45 years later, a somber forerunner to the Movement for Black Lives.
Join us for a commemorative discussion with those who remember along with leading experts. Pastor and civil rights activist Reverend Herbert Daughtry, who led protests after Miller’s death is joined by Paul Butler, author of Chokehold: Policing Black Men, MSNBC contributor, and leading expert on racially motivated police brutality, Elizabeth Hinton, national authority on criminalization and racist policing and author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s, and Hasan Kwame Jeffries, leading scholar of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. NY1’s Errol Louis leads the discussion which remembers Miller’s life and legacy, retells the tragic history, and turns to the widespread racist policing that continues to plague us today.
Special thanks to Arthur Miller's daughters, LoLisa Miller-Bradford and Vallorie Miller, founders of the Arthur Miller Jr., A Daugher Never Forgets Foundation, for their partnership. Join them and Reverend Daughtry for a day of remembrance at The House of the Lord, 415 Atlantic Avenue, Saturday June 17, 9 am - 4 pm. Find out more here.
Participants
Paul Butler is the Albert Brick Professor in Law at Georgetown University Law Center, a legal analyst on MSNBC, and a contributing opinion writer for The Washington Post. He is one of the nation’s most frequently consulted scholars on issues of race and criminal justice. His work has been profiled on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and The ABC, CBS and NBC Evening News.
Professor Butler’s scholarship has been published in leading scholarly journals including the Georgetown Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and the UCLA Law Review. He was awarded Professor of the Year three times by the Georgetown graduating class and received the 2021-22 Frank F. Flagel Teaching Award, the law school’s top teaching honor.
His book Chokehold: Policing Black Men was published in July 2017. The Washington Post named it one of the 50 best non-fiction books of 2017. Chokehold was also named one of the best books of the year by Kirkus Reviews and the Atlanta Journal Constitution. The New York Times described Chokehold as the best book on criminal justice reform since The New Jim Crow. It was a finalist for the 2018 NAACP Image Award for best non-fiction. Professor Butler’s earlier book Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice received the Harry Chapin Media award.
Earlier, Professor Butler served as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice, where his specialty was public corruption. His prosecutions included a United States Senator, three FBI agents, and several other law enforcement officials. He is a graduate of Yale University, cum laude, and Harvard Law School, cum laude.
The Reverend Dr. Herbert Daughtry hails from a family which has produced five generations of Black church leaders. Born in Savannah, Georgia, and raised on the streets of Brooklyn and Jersey City, Reverend Daughtry has risen to positions of national and international prominence.
The National Presiding Bishop Emeritus of The House of the Lord Churches, among Reverend Daughtry’s leadership roles are Founding Chairman of the New York Black United Front; Founding Chairman of the National Black United Front; Founder and President of the African People’s Christian Organization; and more recently, founder of the Downtown Brooklyn Neighborhood Alliance, an organization created in support of Brooklyn residents affected by the Atlantic Yards Project. More than 65 years of involvement in church and community service as a pastor, activist, organizer, humanitarian, and author, have earned him the title, “The People’s Pastor.”
Reverend Daughtry’s long career of activism began with the civil rights struggles in the 1950s, working in collaboration with Brooklyn CORE and Operation Breadbasket, and continuing with his participation in the fight for community control of schools in the late 1960s. In 1976, as a result of the killing of 15-year-old Randolph Evans by a New York City police officer, Reverend Daughtry became a major force in organizing the Coalition of Concerned Leaders and Citizens to Save Our Youth. He was among the protest leaders who led rallies and marches in response to Arthur Miller’s killing in 1978.
Dr. Daughtry was an early opponent of the war in Vietnam and a leading voice in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, a role acknowledged by honor of being invited to participate in the funeral of Nelson Mandela. Of the seventeen member clergy participating, Reverend Daughtry and Reverend Jesse Jackson were the only two who were not South African.
Dr. Daughtry has spoken on numerous occasions at United Nations subcommittee meetings regarding South African apartheid, Cuba, the Middle East, and the state of U.S. civil rights. He has led innumerable delegations in travel around the world in the ongoing struggle for global human rights and self-determination.
Reverend Daughtry is married to Reverend Dr. Karen Smith Daughtry. They have four adult children, Leah, Sharon, Dawnique, and Herbert, Jr; three grandsons, Lorenzo, Herbert III, and Myles; a great-granddaughter, Lauren Joy, and great-grandson, Alexander.
Elizabeth Hinton is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Law at Yale University. Considered one of the nation’s leading experts on criminalization and policing, Hinton’s research focuses on the persistence of poverty, racial inequality, and urban violence in the 20th century United States.
In her first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press), Hinton examines the implementation of federal law enforcement programs beginning in the mid-1960s that transformed domestic social policies and laid the groundwork for the expansion of U.S. policing and prison regimes. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime received numerous awards and recognition, including the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Her recent book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s (Liveright 2021), won a Robert F. Kennedy book award. America on Fire provides a new framework for understanding the problem of police abuse and the broader, systemic repression of Black people and other people of color in post-civil rights America. Both From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime and American on Fire were named New York Times Notable books.
Before joining the Yale faculty, Hinton was a Professor in the Department of History and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She spent two years as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. A Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporation Fellow, Hinton completed her Ph.D. in United States History from Columbia University in 2013.
Her articles and op-eds can be found in the pages of Nature, Science, the Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Time.
Hasan Kwame Jeffries is associate professor of history at the Ohio State University where he has been teaching courses on the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement for the last twenty years.
He is the author of Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt, and the editor of Understanding and Teaching the Civil Rights Movement, which won the 2020 James Harvey Robinson Prize from the American Historical Association for the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. He also wrote and narrated the 10-episode Audible Original series Great Figures of the Civil Rights Movement, which was released in February 2020.
Dr. Jeffries served as the lead historian for the five-year, $25 million renovation of the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. He is also the host of the podcast Teaching Hard History: American Slavery, a production of the Teaching Tolerance division of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Dr. Jeffries earned a BA in history from Morehouse College in 1994 and a PhD in American history with a specialization in African American history from Duke University in 2002.
Errol Louis is the Political Anchor of Spectrum News NY1, where he hosts Inside City Hall, a nightly prime-time show that focuses on New York politics. He regularly interviews top political and cultural leaders, and has moderated more than two dozen debates, including the race for mayor, public advocate, city and state comptroller, state Attorney General and the U.S. Senate. He also was a panelist in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate in Brooklyn between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
In 2019 he launched a popular weekly podcast, You Decide with Errol Louis, that features longer discussions with political and cultural figures including ex-President Bill Clinton; playwright Aaron Sorkin; actors Edward Norton and Brian Cox; and congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Prior to joining Spectrum News NY1, Louis served on the Daily News' editorial board, and he still pens weekly opinion columns for the newspaper. He also hosted a weekday talk show on AM1600 WWRL.
Louis is a longtime CNN Contributor, providing on-air commentary on key events including presidential primaries and Election Night. He writes regularly for CNN.com, as well as a weekly column for New York Magazine on a range of political and social affairs. Additionally, Louis is an adjunct professor of Urban Reporting at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.
Louis graduated from Harvard College a B.A. in Government. He also earned an M.A. in Political Science from Yale University and a J.D. from Brooklyn Law School. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Juanita Scarlett, and their son Noah.
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