Oral Miller, '58: "Leaving his mark on history as an advocate for the blind and visually impaired."
Blind Lawyer Advocates for Visually Impaired
East Kentucky native Oral Miller is leaving his mark on history as an advocate for the blind and visually impaired.
Miller originates from a small community in Carter County called Sophie. The tiny town was near what is now the intersection of Ky. 7 and 986 by Grayson Lake.
When his parents split, his father was left with four young boys, so he decided to send his two youngest to live with aunts. Being the third son, 4-year-old Miller moved to Ashland.
A few years later, “when I was in the third grade, I experienced an incident which eventually took my eyesight,” Miller said.
One weekend “an incident arose over a light bulb” while cleaning a local church. Miller’s uncle accused him of “causing the bulb to burn out,” he said. “While he was raging” his uncle struck him in the face with the bulb. “He was a rather high-tempered man.”
Immediate, significant damage was done to one eye. As the other began to compensate, because of “a process that’s called sympathetic ophthalmia” he lost about half the vision in his uninjured eye during the next year, Miller explained. Another child accidentally poking him in the eye would result in full vision loss the following year.
Miller continued his education and learned “strictly by sitting in the back of the room and listening to the other kids and taking part in as many school activities as I could based on my visual status at that time,” he said.
After learning of the Kentucky School for the Blind “arrangements were made for me to go away very soon to what was then far away Louisville,” he said. Miller boarded a train with a family friend that happened to be making a trip to Louisville just in time to enroll in the fifth grade.
He was taught braille, how to use a hand slate and navigate using a long cane. His junior and senior years, he attended classes at Louisville Male High School, a public school in the city.
In 1951, Miller graduated valedictorian from high school. This brought him to the attention of many colleges and alumni from the high school.
Through an alumnus, Miller was introduced to Princeton University, where he would ultimately attend and graduate near the top of his class with a major in American and European History and the hopes to someday work in law.
Miller pursued that dream by attending the University of Chicago Law School and began practicing a year after graduation as an assistant for Claude Asbury, an attorney in Catlettsburg.
Read more at The Daily Independent