Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 9/18/1941
WEBSITE: http://www.aminahassan.com/
CITY: Washington
STATE: DC
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
Lives in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, CA * http://www.blackpast.org/contributor/hassan-amina * http://www.theazaragroup.com/about/our-team/amina-hassan-phd/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born September 18, 1941.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, B.A.; Scripps College of Communication, Ph.D.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Historian, documentarian. The Azara Group, New York, NY, media content consultant and researcher.
AWARDS:Historical Society of Southern California, Donald H. Pflueger Award 2016, for Loren Miller.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Historian, scholar, and media consultant Amina Hassan is an award-winning public radio documentarian who has worked on a thirteen-part series for National Public Radio on how race, class, and gender shape American sports. She also worked on the U.S. invasion of Grenada, and issues of race and diversity. At The Azara Group based in New York, she works as a media content consultant and researcher to support the leadership development, negotiation, strategy consulting, and diversity services of the firm. Hassan holds a B.A. degree from University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University.
In 2015, Hassan published Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist, a biography of Miller, a journalist, civil rights activist, and judge who fought racial discrimination in housing and education from the 1940s to the early 1960s. The book received the 2016 Donald H. Pflueger Award from the Historical Society of Southern California. Miller, who worked with Thurgood Marshall, argued the Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) case, which abolished racially restrictive real estate housing covenants, and played a key role in Brown v. Board of Education, which ended legal segregation in public schools.
In the book, Hassan reveals Miller’s life: he was born to a former slave and a white Midwesterner in 1903. Struggling to better himself, he rose out of rural poverty and gained an education. He earned a law degree and moved from Kansas to Los Angeles in 1929. Miller was known for his wit, power as a debater, and ability to uncover hypocrisy and double-talk. He also turned to radical journalism writing for the long-running African American newspaper the California Eagle, where he wrote about racism. Miller also worked for the ACLU’s chapter in California where he protested the internment of Japanese Americans. He also helped to integrate the U.S. military and Los Angeles Fire Department, and defended Black Muslims. He eventually became a municipal judge in Los Angeles.
Despite some overlong passages on minor details, Hassan “successfully explains how Miller was a key character in the civil rights struggle in America,” according to John Rodzvilla in Library Journal. During his life and work, Miller struggled to reconcile class differences between his poor upbringing and later work with elite black scholars. Writing in Journal of Southern History, Lauren Pearlman said: “Although Miller’s rags-to-riches story is central to understanding his life, Hassan’s efforts to paint Miller as an outsider overlook how he also benefited from his light skin color, which allowed him to run in a small circle of educated African American professionals.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, February, 2017, Lauren Pearlman, review of Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist, p. 223.
Library Journal, September 15, 2015, John Rodzvilla, review of Loren Miller, p. 85.
ONLINE
Amina Hassan Website, http://www.aminahassan.com/ (August 1, 2017), author profile.*
Amina Hassan, PhD
Consultant & Researcher
Amina Hassan, Ph.D Dr. Amina Hassan is a scholar, researcher, and award-winning public radio documentarian with productions ranging from the coup and on-the-spot recordings of the US invasion of Grenada to a 13-part radio series for NPR on how race, class, and gender shape American sports.
With over 40 years of research expertise on issues of race and diversity, Dr. Hassan’s latest accomplishment is the recently published biography Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist.
For The Azara Group, she serves as a consultant on media content and as an expert researcher to support the leadership development, negotiation, strategy consulting, and diversity services of the firm.
Dr. Hassan received her PhD from the Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University and her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, California.
Hassan, Amina
hassan_amina.jpg
Amina Hassan, a second generation Angeleno, is an independent scholar and an award-winning public radio documentarian with productions ranging from the coup and on-the-spot recording of the U.S. invasion of Grenada, to a radio series for National Public Radio on how race, class and gender shape American sport. Her Ph.D. from Ohio University is in rhetorical criticism. She received her bachelor of arts from the University of California, Berkeley. Presently, she is working on the first critical biography of Loren Miller, civil rights attorney and journalist.
AFFILIATION:
Independent Historian EMAIL:
radioah@gmail.com
Dr. Amina Hassan is a scholar, researcher, and award-winning public radio documentarian with productions ranging from the coup and on-the-spot recordings of the US invasion of Grenada to a 13-part radio series for NPR on how race, class, and gender shape American sports.
With over 40 years of research expertise on issues of race and diversity, Dr. Hassan’s latest accomplishment is the recently published biography Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist, winner of the 2016 Donald H. Pflueger award, the Historical Society of Southern California's most prestigious book award.
Dr. Hassan received her PhD from the Scripps College of Communication, Ohio University and her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley.
Hassan, Amina. Loren Miller: Civil Rights
Attorney and Journalist
John Rodzvilla
Library Journal.
140.15 (Sept. 15, 2015): p85.
COPYRIGHT 2015 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Hassan, Amina. Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist. Univ. of Oklahoma. Sept. 2015.312p. illus. bibliog.
index. ISBN 9780806149165. $26.95. biog
In her new biography on Loren Miller (1903-67), historian Hassan covers the life of a man who was, by turns, a
journalist, civil rights activist, attorney, and judge. Using archives from the Huntington Library, Art Collections and
Botanical Gardens, the author traces Miller's early childhood in a mixed-race family through his career as a municipal
judge in Los Angeles. A considerable portion of the book describes the subject's travels with Langston Hughes to
Soviet Russia for a film on race relations in that country. Later chapters focus on Miller's work as a civil rights attorney
and his appearance with co-counsel Thurgood Marshall before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hassan's attempt to capture the
social and political atmosphere occasionally leads to overly long passages on minor details, but she successfully
explains how Miller was a key character in the civil rights struggle in America. VERDICT A recommended work that
adds to the corpus of civil rights histories and offers a rich portrait of a central figure in the related struggle in
California.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston
Rodzvilla, John
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Rodzvilla, John. "Hassan, Amina. Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2015,
p. 85. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA429499573&it=r&asid=cb81c8824c5c799973e71b77a9008923.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A429499573
7/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499638387592 2/3
Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and
Journalist
Lauren Pearlman
Journal of Southern History.
83.1 (Feb. 2017): p223.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist. By Amina Hassan. Race and Culture in the American West.
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. Pp. xvi, 294. $26.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-4916-5.)
Landmark civil rights cases and the lawyers who litigated them remain of interest to legal scholars and historians of the
civil rights movement. Most notably, there has been a continued focus on 1954's Brown v. Board of Education and
NAACP counselor and Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. By drawing attention to 1948's Shelley v. Kraemer,
the understudied Supreme Court case that abolished racially restrictive real estate housing covenants, and to Loren
Miller, one of the country's most prominent civil rights attorneys, Amina Hassan's biography is a welcome addition to
these fields.
Like some biographers, Hassan has a personal connection to her subject; Miller represented her father after he was
denied service at a Los Angeles restaurant. As she reveals, her father was one of many unfairly discriminated against
clients for whom Miller worked as he forged a fascinating career that blended citizen journalism with a legal practice
motivated chiefly by "the need to put food on the table" (p. 4). Hassan captures in vivid detail Miller's mid-western
upbringing, his remarkable journey to the Soviet Union with Langston Hughes, and his systematic demolition of
restrictive housing covenants in the courts. Guided by an uncompromising moral compass, Miller defended Japanese
Americans during World War II, helped integrate the U.S. military, wrote the majority of the appellate briefs in Brown,
and, toward the end of his life, took up the issue of police brutality at the behest of Malcolm X.
Black activists' relationships with communism were usually fraught, and Miller's was no exception. Hassan shows how
Miller took pains to distance himself from his earlier radical politics and representation of communist clients as he
shifted his political position from the radical Left to left of center from the 1920s through the 1960s. Thus Miller's life
story serves as a revealing window into race relations and the particular political landscape that shaped civil rights cases
during the mid-twentieth century.
Hassan's book is best read as a deep exploration of important milestones in Miller's life. Although she often goes into
meticulous detail, thanks to extensive archival work in the Huntington Library's Loren Miller Papers, the NAACP
archives, oral histories, and newspapers, certain relationships drop from the narrative while other events are simply
glossed over. This approach works to uneven effect. On one hand, the details of Miller's trip to Moscow are revealing of
both his character and the state of early Cold War politics. Yet other issues remain underinvestigated. How, for
example, did Miller negotiate his role with the Los Angeles NAACP chapter after chastising the national office's
conservative politics for decades? Similarly, Hassan hints at Miller's deep class-related anxieties while working with
elite black colleagues like Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and Robert C. Weaver. Although Miller's rags-to-riches
story is central to understanding his life, Hassan's efforts to paint Miller as an outsider overlook how he also benefited
from his light skin color, which allowed him to run in a small circle of educated African American professionals.
"Besides racism," Hassan asks at the beginning of her book, "what curtailed Miller's prospect for anything higher than
an appointment to the municipal court?" (p. 9). This is the question that seems to nag her throughout the biography.
While one can glean insights from the various events she examines, a satisfactory answer is not readily apparent. A
sharper analysis would have helped structure the biography. Even so, civil rights historians and legal scholars alike will
find much of interest in this new book.
Lauren Pearlman
University of Florida
7/9/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1499638387592 3/3
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Pearlman, Lauren. "Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist." Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 1,
2017, p. 223+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481354194&it=r&asid=ba05e0353bcd026f2020c37754d0cde6.
Accessed 9 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481354194