![]() “They said, ‘You’re so clear from your perspective and we think that perspective needs to be heard.’ They didn’t know anything about my personal story.”Īfter getting the assignment she pulled out her mobile phone and started dictating her thoughts. “When I’m on a call with them and I have something to say, I lay it out,” Miller said. They wanted to tap into the passion that the typically exuberant Miller was bringing to their discussions on the subject in editorial meetings. Miller never discussed the painful aspect of her family background on TV until she was asked by “CBS This Morning” executive producer Diana Miller and senior producer Brian Bingham to reflect on the nation’s response to Floyd’s death in a personal essay. “It was until 10 years later after my son was born that I felt this real need for her to acknowledge this whole lineage and when she told me she wouldn’t, that’s when it hurt,” said Miller, the mother of two teenagers. Her mother’s relatives have no knowledge of her existence to this day. ![]() They spoke for the first time in the early 1990s, when her father was diagnosed with cancer, but rarely after that. Racism forced Miller to grow up without having any relationship with her mother. The woman kept her pregnancy secret from her own family members who disapproved of her dating a Black man. The relatives of Miller’s father cared for her because he was not married to her mother, a white administrator at the hospital where he worked. “As we were flying in, Robert Kennedy was flying out in a casket,” she said. She had been living with an aunt in Alabama and that month was taken in by her grandmother in South Central. Michelle Miller was only 6 months old at the time of the shooting that was part of a tumultuous year filled with social upheaval. Kennedy died the following day, but the other victims of the assassin Sirhan Sirhan who were treated by Dr. Instead, he tended to the gravely wounded Kennedy - after having to convince security people who did not believe he was a doctor because he was Black - and was the first to tell TV news reporters about the candidate’s condition. Miller was among the celebrating Kennedy supporters in the room, eager to head to the Democratic nominating convention in Chicago as a delegate. Those dreams were deferred in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in downtown Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when gun shots rang out after Kennedy declared victory in the California primary.ĭr. Kennedy, whose bid for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination was propelled by a message of social and economic equality that appealed both to Black voters and working class whites. ![]() “We suffer these indignities every day, all the time.”Īs Miller said in an essay she delivered on a recent edition of “CBS This Morning,” her father placed his hopes for the country’s future in Robert F. “I simply said to her ‘I’m cleaning this cart for me,’ ” he said. Pierre Thomas, the justice correspondent for ABC News, told how he recently was wiping down a shopping cart at a supermarket when a white woman motioned to him as if he was cleaning the cart for her. Zirinsky said every Black correspondent has experienced racial bias, and in on-air panel discussions in the days following after the Floyd killing they shared examples freely. “The ability of reporters like Michelle to share their experiences in a meaningful way really does allow America to see itself.” “Reporters and anchors of color are feeling this story in a different way than others, and I think their ability to draw string from their past is a very valuable asset,” said CBS News President Susan Zirinsky. In the aftermath of George Floyd, the unarmed black man killed May 25 while in the custody of Minneapolis police, voices such as Miller’s have been amplified in TV newsrooms that are covering the protests and a cultural reckoning brought on by the event.
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