He Helped Make Montclair

June 16, 2008

When Don Miller and his family moved to 14 Stanford Place in 1961, they crossed a red line of racial division. Neighbors dumped garbage on their lawn, set off cherry bombs in the middle of the night, and stood outside singing ‘Ole Black Joe.’

But Stanford Place was not in some segregated hamlet in deepest Mississippi. It is a street in Miller’s hometown — Montclair.

Miller and his wife Judy brought up their children in that home, now part of an integrated middle class neighborhood. He became a painter who depicted African kings and queens, as well as African-American boys and girls. And he became a civil rights activist with a national reputation. Rosa Parks and Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy traveled to Montclair to see Don Miller.

If the Montclair of today takes pride in being a vibrant, progressive multi-ethnic suburb that celebrates its quirky writers and artists, it is in no small measure thanks to Don Miller.

Jason Lemire, a 1997 Montclair High graduate who went on to Middlebury College and a career as a playwright and screenwriter, grew up across the street from Miller. He remembers being a young white boy scared to mow the Miller lawn — not because of any racial apprehension, but because he was in awe of the man he considered a hero.

Lemire wants to be sure his neighbor, who died in 1993, will not be forgotten. He has written a screenplay about Miller’s life, and last week there was a dramatic reading before an audience that packed Leir Hall at the Montclair Art Museum. It depicted the scary first nights at Stanford Place, and the afternoon when Miller, then a teenager, walked out of the balcony at the Bellevue Theater and sat downstairs to see a movie. Black people weren’t supposed to do that in 1940s Montclair .

Before the reading Lemire showed slides of Miller’s works. One painting depicted an African woman in a woven, trumpet-like traditional headdress. “How many artists were exploring this subject matter in 1952?” he asked. The crowd was artsy, racially diverse. Montclair, 2008.

Lemire’s website, The Don Miller Project, has images of Miller’s paintings including the King Mural on display at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington DC.

Two years ago Lemire mentioned the Don Miller story at a pitch meeting in Hollywood, and the producer encouraged him to write it.

Now that he has written it, he will go back to those pitch meetings, hoping to turn the Don Miller story into a movie that could only have been written by somebody raised in the Montclair that Don Miller helped create.

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He Helped Make Montclair

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