Kelly Miller High School in Clarksburg was a segregated regional school for African American children. Built by Charles D. Ogden and opened in 1903, the school grew quickly due to an influx of Black industrial workers who brought their children with them at the beginning of the Great Migration. The school closed in 1956, two years after Brown v Board of Education mandated integration.

After desegregation, the building was converted into a trade school and renamed the Harrison County Adult Training Center. After the trade school relocated, the former Kelly Miller school building served as the Harrison County Board of Education’s main office until 2016, when the board moved into a larger building. Today, the Kelly Miller School building houses the offices of the West Virginia Black Heritage Festival and the nonprofit Kelly Miller Community Center.

Although it was called a high school, Kelly Miller had classes for grades 1 through 12. In addition to functioning as a school, it served as a gathering place for Harrison County’s Black community. As the closest Black school for several neighboring counties, Kelly Miller served a broad section of West Virginia. On Sunday nights or Monday mornings, students would journey from neighboring counties such as Taylor, Lewis, and Barbour to attend school, staying overnight with local families throughout the week. After school hours, some of the school’s facilities, such as its gymnasium and library, were used by students and adults from the local Black community. During World War II, the school hosted night classes for adults who wanted to improve their vocational skills. Each year, the school’s Emancipation Day celebrated parades and speeches from local Black leaders. Kelly Miller was considered one of the best Black high schools in the state, with a 1922 government report listing it as one of only six Black “High Schools of First Class” in West Virginia.

The school was named after prominent African American scholar Kelly Miller (1863-1939), a mathematician, sociologist, writer, and educator. Miller was the first Black man to attend Johns Hopkins University, and went on to teach mathematics and sociology at Howard University. He gained national prominence as a civil rights writer and sociologist, known primarily for his emphasis on higher education as a path forward for African Americans. Miller was appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins in 1911, in which capacity he embarked on a nationwide admissions-recruiting tour of Black high schools.

The school’s original principal was Duncan Huey Kyle (1878-1956). In 1919, Emmett Bismark Saunders (1888-1976) became Kelly Miller’s longtime principal until its closing in 1956. With a degree in agriculture from Ohio State University, Saunders had begun his career as an instructor at West Virginia State University (then called West Virginia Collegiate Institute). Saunders earned his Ph.D. in 1946 from Ohio State and sent his five children to college. Throughout his life, he was highly active in local and statewide civic organizations. The street on which the former school stands was renamed from Waters Street to E. B. Saunders Way in his honor.

Notable alumni of the Kelly Miller School include Milwaukee Hawks basketball player Bob Wilson, Tuskegee Airman Thomas Mayfield, Marshall University professor and Huntington-area civil rights leader Philip Carter, West Virginia Black Heritage Festival President James Griffin, and West Virginia University’s first Black professor, Victorine Louistall Monroe.

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