E. Walter Miles, retired political science professor, dies at 86

His specialty as a pioneering Black political science professor at San Diego State University was the U.S. Constitution, and E. Walter Miles saw that founding document as a living thing that needed exercise now and then.

So he was an activist as well as an academic.

Miles, who died July 8 in San Diego at age 86, had a social-justice resume that included desegregating restaurants in Indiana, boycotting businesses that discriminated in Texas, and pushing for equitable housing in North Carolina.

“I was born into it,” he said in a 1993 interview with an American Civil Liberties Union publication, which helps explain why he was willing to come to SDSU in the mid-1960s and be the only Black professor on campus.

He spent more than 30 years at the university, including a term as head of the political science department, and is remembered for starting public law classes that are still taught there.

He co-authored the textbook “Vital Issues of the Constitution” and was a contributor to “Great Cases of the Supreme Court,” which included looks at landmark decisions involving slavery, the right to vote, and freedom of expression.

A member of the editorial boards of several academic journals, Miles was also active in the American Political Science Association, serving on a committee that tried to increase the participation of African-Americans in the discipline.

In the community, he led San Diego chapters of the Urban League and the ACLU, and also served on the ACLU’s national board.

Elijah Walter Miles was born May 4, 1934, in Hearne, Texas, one of eight children. His parents, John and Millie Miles, ran a dry cleaning store and believed in education and civic engagement. All their children went to college.

“My parents taught their kids to be active,” Miles told an interviewer once. “We got it naturally.”

He went to Prairie View A&M in Texas, and then, after a stint in the U.S. Army in Korea, to Indiana University, where he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in government and a nickname that stuck: Wally.

Drawn to political science as an academic specialty, he taught and did research at Indiana, Prairie View A&M, and the University of North Carolina for several years. At each of those stops, he was also active in anti-discrimination protests in the surrounding communities.

Miles was hired at SDSU in 1966, and a year later he won a distinguished teaching award. There had been a handful of Black professors on campus before him, but none when he arrived, according to the 2019 book, “The Black in Crimson and Black: A History and Profiles of African-Americans at SDSU,” by retired university librarian Robert Fikes.

The book described Miles as “a natural politician who was a master at getting things done behind the scenes,” and called him “The Godfather of Black Faculty.”

“He was very much respected by his colleagues,” said Farid Abdel-Nour, current chair of the political science department. “The term that keeps coming up when people talk about him is ‘mentor.’ They saw him as a mentor and a trusted adviser.”

Two of the classes that Miles designed, Law and the Political System and The Supreme Court and Contemporary Issues, “remain extremely popular with students today,” Abdel-Nour said.

In 1990, Miles and other university employees went public with a report criticizing the school for not doing enough to hire and promote Black faculty and staff. It said administrators had substituted “meaningless rhetoric” for “meaningful progress,” noting that the number of Black employees had increased by only six from 1975 to 1988.

Administrators disputed many of the report’s findings, but pledged to keep working on what they agreed was a problem. In 1990, according to the report, about 2 percent of the faculty was Black. This fall, it was 3.6 percent, according to campus statistics.

“That’s what he was about,” said a son, Tony Miles. “He wanted to create change so that people coming along after him would have it better.”

Survivors include his wife of 62 years, Frances, of Scripps Ranch; two sons, Christoper (and his wife Donna) of Poway and Tony (Maisha) of Bowie, Md.; two sisters, Iola Taylor of Austin, Texas, and Ella Lindsey (Larry) of Anaheim Hills, CA.; a brother, Edgar Miles (Ann), of Amarillo, Texas; and one grandson, Brayden.

A memorial service is scheduled for Aug. 5 at 11:30 a.m. at Greenwood Memorial Park in San Diego.