Thomas Ezekiel Miller (June 17, 1849 – April 8, 1938) was an American educator, lawyer and politician. After being elected as a state legislator in South Carolina, he was one of only five African Americans elected to Congress from the South in the Jim Crow era of the last decade of the nineteenth century, as disfranchisement reduced black voting. After that, no African Americans were elected from the South until 1972.

Miller was a prominent leader in the struggle for civil rights in the American South during and after Reconstruction. He was a school commissioner, state legislator, U.S. Representative, and first president of South Carolina State University, a historically black college established as a land-grant school.

Miller was born in Ferrebeeville, South Carolina, named after his adoptive mother's likely slaver. His origins were unclear although he apparently had majority European heritage. The historians Eric Foner and Stephen Middleton found that his mother was a fair-skinned mulatto daughter of Judge Thomas Heyward, Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and his father a wealthy young white man, whose family rejected their relationship. They forced him to give up his son for adoption. He was adopted by former slaves Richard and Mary Ferrebee Miller, who were freed by 1850.

The boy's European appearance long prompted speculation about his paternity. In 1851, his family moved to Charleston, where Miller attended a school for free colored children. When the Civil War ended, he moved to Hudson, New York. Because of his appearance and high proportion of European ancestry, Miller could have passed for white in the North, but chose to identify as black and return to the South to help the freedmen. Receiving a scholarship, Miller attended Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1872.

Miller returned to South Carolina, where he was appointed as a school commissioner of Beaufort County that same year. He studied law at the South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina), where black students were admitted for the first time under the Republican state legislature, and graduated in 1875. He was admitted to the bar that year. (After Democrats regained control of the state legislature in 1876-1877, they forced black students out of the flagship college.)

He married Anna Hume, and they had nine children together. His son-in law was noted architect, William Wilson Cooke, married to his daughter Anne Miller; and by whom he had two grandchildren, Anne Cooke Reid, and Lloyd Miller Cooke.

Miller was elected as a Republican to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1874, serving three terms until 1880. He was elected to the South Carolina Senate in 1880, serving one term until 1882. He was nominated for lieutenant governor but did not enter the race. He struggled his entire life to find acceptance in the black and white communities. African-American political rivals dismissed him as a white imposter attempting to take advantage of the post–Civil War black electorate. Yet Miller, who embraced the black heritage nurtured by his adoptive parents, was also ostracized by white colleagues.

Despite the issues, he was elected chairman of the state Republican Party in 1884.