April 7, 1933 — August 6, 2023
Oral was the third of four brothers and is survived by nieces, nephews, cousins, and stepchildren. He had a heart of gold and a mind that was beyond price.
Born and raised in Kentucky, he attended the Kentucky School for the Blind after losing his vision in the third grade due to an accident. After graduating from high school as valedictorian, he attended Princeton University, where he became the first blind athlete to compete in an NCAA team sport as a member of the Princeton crew. Both rowing and Princeton were passions of Oral’s throughout his life.
After briefly practicing law in Louisville, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the Navy before beginning his 22-year career as an attorney for the Small Business Administration. He held leadership positions in many national and international sports-related organizations, most notably as president of the United States Association of Blind Athletes (USABA).
In the 1970s, he began his involvement in ACB leadership. He became president of ABLA in 1976, where many of us first came to know him. From 1978 to 1981, he was president of ACB. He also became what we would now call ACB’s first executive director.
Oral and his wife, Roberta Douglas, loved traveling throughout the world. But for them, traveling served two purposes: first, to experience the amazing richness of the world, and second, to advocate for people with vision loss in other nations.
He retired from ACB in 1998, but he never stopped volunteering for the organization. He won numerous awards, including a Miguel Medal in 2014 from the American Foundation for the Blind and it was one of my greatest honors on my blindness community journey to be the primary presenter of that award.
I want to focus the remainder of this testimonial on Oral the advocate and Oral the person.
Put simply, I have never known a person who had the incredible combination of intelligence, talent in diverse areas, kindness, and humility that Oral had. If you think of an advocate as someone who uses fiery and ringing oratory, well, that wasn’t Oral. Persistent is how former ACB executive director Melanie Brunson described his advocacy style. Let’s just say Oral advocated like a dog going after a bone. He never quit until he achieved his goal. I suspect he won far more with sugar than he would have won with spice.
In my view, however, Oral’s prowess as an athlete, an advocate, or a fine legal mind all pale in comparison with the person that was Oral Miller. When you had a conversation with Oral, he made you feel like you were the most important person in the room. When you finished chatting with Oral you just felt better than you did before the conversation began.
if you knew Oral, you'd likely agree that he would end this tribute by saying, “I am Oral Miller from Washington, D.C., land of taxation without representation.”