“Black radio is becoming colorless,” he warned in a 1988 interview with The Los Angeles Daily News. “They’re trying to reverse the crossover trend, and that’s just not smart. It doesn’t stop until we say, ‘Wait a minute; we are the trendsetters and stop being led by the tail and are the leaders that we are.”
“We encourage the mainstay of black artists to stop cutting soft, watered-down black records,” he added.
That article referred to Mr. Miller as “Moses to a Nation of Radio Programmers and Executives.”
Sidney August Anthony Miller II was born on December 13, 1932 in Pensacola, Florida, to Sidney and Evelyn (Maddox) Miller. After graduating from Booker T. Washington High School in Pensacola, he enrolled at Florida A&M as a pre-med student. But he was also a musician, playing trumpet in the college band, and working a side business booking music acts, including jazz musicians Cannonball and Nat Adderley, his fellow students.
After college, where he served in ROTC, he joined the military, served in Texas and continued to book sideline activities. In the 1960s, he joined Capitol Records – first in Atlanta, where he headed the Fame subsidiary, and then in Los Angeles. One day in 1970, while walking from the Capitol Records tower to Hollywood Boulevard, he was intrigued by the Florida license plate on a parked car. Inside were two young women, Susan Marie Enzor and her sister, Dottie, who were adventuring across the country.
Soon he and Susan married and she became his business partner when he founded Black Radio Exclusive in 1976. The magazine continued to publish for some 40 years.
At the time, the conventions were both a showcase for new talent and a forum for serious discussion. The 1988 conference, for example, featured a panel on whether rap music reinforced negative stereotypes of black people. Ice-T was among those who spoke on the matter.