Contact Information
Biography Information
Theodore Miller is an American lawyer and entrepreneur. He is currently on leave as the managing member and general counsel of Mid-City Capital, a real estate acquisition and development company of urban infill commercial real estate in Southern California.
A graduate of Yale University in African-American Studies and Literature, and Harvard Law School, Mr. Miller was inspired as an undergraduate by the youth residents of New Haven, where he worked as a community organizer and mental health counselor for incarcerated, hospitalized and underserved youth, as he continues to seek links, opportunities and connections to impact the social chain of humanity. He is a practicing attorney, a member of the Bars of California and New York, and a licensed real estate broker in California.
Before rejoining the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University as a Du Bois Fellow (he was previously a teaching fellow in the Department), Mr. Miller was a corporate attorney at the firm Davis Polk & Wardwell, where he advised high technology companies and publicly traded investment banks on acquisitions, corporate finance, SEC disclosure and corporate governance, and performed extensive pro bono services, including tenant's rights, immigration appeals, adoptions and small business formation.
His research and entrepreneurial interests center on: organizational structure, behavior and social enterprise; entrepreneurship in marginal marketplaces; and hiphop and economic sociology.
Project Description
“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring….”
–Martin Luther King, Jr., April 4, 1967
Utilizing the prophetic framework of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 1967 conception in his “Vietnam No More” speech of what I term the “beggar’s edifice” and with particular emphasis on the lived and built environment in urban America, we examine what legal and hiphop scholars have characterized as a failed legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Adolescents living in America’s urban core today are statistically more likely to die prematurely, on parole, without pension and with a negative net worth than their predecessor generations notwithstanding the legal gains of the Movement. Why is the neighborhood so “poor”? Or is it? And how does hiphop reframe our conception of this pervasive “place”?
Through the case studies of urban developers interested in social entrepreneurship, hiphop collectives focused on community (re)development and multiple hiphop “battles” for space and place, we look at personal “cribs” and familial and communal dimensions of space and place in “hiphop America” through the eyes of practitioners. Highlighting problems and opportunities in a “winner-take all” society in which hiphop is often heard but disregarded, we hope this conversation might contribute to more socially useful and innovative models of social change and (re)development in the urban core.