In 1968, civil rights activists Earnest and Beatrice Miller became part of what is known as the Great Migration, moving their five children to Chicago from a tiny town in Mississippi, the state that has been called the heart of the civil rights movement. In Shaw, where the Millers had been raising their family, prejudice against the Black population was so institutionalized that the town would later be sued as part of a landmark civil rights case.
“I can stay here and continue to fight this, or we can decide to move up North for better opportunities,” Beatrice would say, determined that her children and grandchildren get the kind of education that had eluded her when she was forced after sixth grade to leave school to work as a sharecropper in the fields of the Mississippi Delta.
Beatrice made good on that promise. Soon after the Millers landed in Chicago, their 18-year daughter, Jeannette, gave birth to their first grandchild, Angela. A single mother, Jeannette went to work for the U.S. Postal Service (where she retired 37 years later) and left Angela in the care of the family matriarch — who both pampered and protected the child.
“She vowed that I would be the first to graduate from college,” says the granddaughter, Angela Miller-May, proudly noting that Beatrice was part of the famous Freedom Riders, activists who rode interstate buses in the South in mixed racial groups to challenge segregation in seating.
“I was her job,” Miller-May recalled in a recent Zoom interview with Institutional Investor, saying she thought she was “getting away” from her grandmother when she started kindergarten. But no, her grandma informed her that she had taken a volunteer job at the school so she could be by her side. Starting at that early age, Miller-May says she “didn’t have a choice” but to be a good student.
It paid off. After attending a prestigious Chicago Catholic high school, Miller-May studied medicine before switching to economics — later getting an MBA to learn the basics of investment management after the global financial crisis upended the banking industry. In a career that has spanned three decades, she rose from a bank teller to her current position as chief investment officer of the $52 billion Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, the best-performing pension fund in the state.
“She has done everything,” says her current boss, Brian Collins, the executive director of IMRF, referring to the spectrum of finance jobs Miller-May has held. Collins hired her away from the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund in 2021, a volatile time in the markets that forced Miller-May to immediately rebalanceIMRF’s investment portfolio, slashing its equities and increasing private credit. After losing about 4 percent in 2022 — but still beating its benchmark and vastly overperforming the broader stock market — IMRF bounced back in 2023 with a 13.22 percent net gain.
Miller-May, one of a handful of African American women CIOs at U.S. public pension funds, has a strong commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. That is a prerequisite in Illinois, whose state legislature mandates its investment managers strive to have at least 20 percent of their assets run by women, minorities, or people with disabilities. Given that white men dominate investment management, it’s a tall order — but one Miller-May has managed adroitly. At CTPF, she built out an analytical capability to find managers with expertise in such esoteric and overlooked assets as African private equity, an investment that won praise from USAID, the agency for international development. When Miller-May left, 45 percent of Chicago Teachers’ $12 billion was invested with diverse managers. These aren’t charitable endeavors. According to Miller-May — and numerous studies — diverse managers serve to both de-risk a portfolio and to add to its performance.
“It is vitally important to have the voices out there that can offer a clear, rational, logical reason for the exposures that they’re putting in their portfolios and to show their success,” says Kirk Sims, head of the emerging manager program at the Teacher Retirement System of Texas. Sims, who got to know Miller-May when he was a senior investment officer at the Teachers’ Retirement System of Illinois, says she serves “a vital role” in that regard.
But Miller-May’s rise to prominence in the world of public pensions was hardly a given.
You can read my profile of Angela Miller-May here:
Michelle Celarier 