Doris "Dorie" Miller was born near Waco, Texas, the third of four sons of sharecroppers Connery and Henrietta Miller.
Doris "Dorie" Miller was born on October 12, 1919, on a farm outside Waco, Texas, to Connery and Henrietta Miller, who worked as sharecroppers. He was the third of their four sons, given the unusual first name "Doris" reportedly because his family had expected a girl.
Growing up in rural, segregated East Texas during the Jim Crow era, Miller worked on the family farm, attended Waco's A.J. Moore High School, and helped support his family financially. He was known as a large, physically strong young man who excelled at fullback on his school's football team, and he also worked briefly as a cook and civilian laborer before enlisting in the United States Navy.
His early life in the segregated South shaped the barriers he would later confront: at the time, the U.S. Navy restricted Black sailors like Miller almost exclusively to the Mess Attendant Branch, meaning they served as cooks, stewards, and servants rather than in combat roles, regardless of their skill or courage. This institutional racism set the stage for the extraordinary nature of his actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor just over two decades later, which would make him a national symbol of the injustice of a segregated military and the heroism that could emerge from its lowest-ranked sailors.