"CBS Saturday Morning" co-host and veteran reporter Michelle Miller is finding out that her New York Times Best-Selling memoir is literally changing lives. Miller's Belonging: A Daughter's Search for Identity Through Love and Loss was published earlier this year by Harper Collins.
Miller recently spoke with WBGO News Director Doug Doyle about her journey.
Throughout much of her life, Michelle Miller has had to deal with a family secret that has shaped her personal and professional life in so many ways and she says the rejection from her birth mother has shaped Michelle’s understanding of herself and her own Blackness.
"I am what they call a love child. My parents had an affair. My father would tell me the story like this 'We fell in love. We had you and then she had to leave.' It would take some 23-24 years to discover the truth behind her leaving. But when you talk about abandonment, it was less about abandonment for me and more about just the absence of having a mother. A mother they way others had mothers. The way Ozzie and Harriet had sort of given that ideal of what a family was supposed to look like. In truth, this is a book that is not only a book about the loss, but it is a book all the gains. All the women, all the men, all the people who filled that absence. Sometimes we don't recognize what we have until it's gone but this was really a love letter to all those people as well."
Miller was born during a time in Los Angeles that was deeply segregated in 1967. Her father, Dr. Ross Miller, was a prominent married trauma surgeon who was the first physician to attend to Robert F. Kennedy at the site of his assassination on June 5, 1968. Dr. Miller was also Compton's first Black City councilman.
Raised largely by her father and her paternal grandmother, Michelle had no knowledge of the woman whose genes she shared. Then, fate intervened when Michelle was in her early 20's. As her father lay stricken with cancer, he told her, “Go and find your mother.”
Miller says when she eventually did get to meet with her mom. The chat lasted an hour.
"It resulted in me finding answers. There was a lot flushed out in that initial conversation. I was one of the lucky ones. I found my mother pretty quickly through a friend who had access to a lot of records. He helped me find her. She agreed to meet with me. I tried to fill that hour with every question from anything associated with my DNA to the why, the big question we would all ask. She answered those questions. The big why was because her family found out she was dating an African American and they said it was him or the family. That was somewhat striking because she also shared with me that she was in a sense of discovery about her own Mexican roots. And so here is a woman who is a Latina whose family is first generation immigrants who felt the need to discriminate based on the fact they were trying to ascend into 'The American Dream' and the American Dream looked a certain way to them. That was really eye-opening."
Miller says the catalyst that launched her memoir was her telling the story of the murder of George Floyd.
"I was assigned to give a perspective through the lens of all my social justice coverage. I grabbed my phone and I dictated for about five minutes. In the middle of this dictation, this stream of consciousness, I said racism has infected me all my life. Born into the unrest of late 1960's. I was the daughter of a Black surgeon who adored me and a mother, to this day, who does not acknowledge my existence. Like so many people out there who have been left behind, for good reasons and not so many good reasons, that sense that we were abandoned is something we always grapple with. That next chapter that I talk about about is really dealing with the lack of acknowledgement moving forward out of that moment of desperation. And I think I do it in a way that gives some grace but really deals with the hard questions of the secrets we choose to keep because we all have them. Why this resonates so much because I think so many people share this story."
Belonging is the chronicle of Michelle’s decades-long quest to connect with the woman who gave her life, to confront her past, and ultimately, to find her voice as a journalist, a wife, and a mother.
Michelle is married to Mark Morial, the former New Orleans Mayor and current President and CEO of the National Urban League. Morial has wanted his wife to write her memoir for many years.
Miller earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from Howard University and holds a Master of Science degree in urban studies from the University of New Orleans.
Miller, a CBS News veteran, received an Edward R. Murrow award in 1998 and the Woman of the Year Award from the National Sports Foundation.
You can SEE the entire interview with Michelle Miller here.
