MEIER, August 1923-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born April 30, 1923, in New York, NY; died from a progressive neurological disorder March 19, 2003, in New York, NY. Educator and author. Meier was an expert on African-American intellectual thought during the civil rights movement. He was a graduate of Oberlin College, where he earned an A.B. in 1945, after which he worked as an assistant professor at Tougalloo College in Mississippi until 1949. That year, he receives his master's degree from Columbia University, where he also earned a Ph.D. in 1957. During the 1950s and early 1960s Meier taught history at Fisk University and Morgan State College; then, from 1964 to 1967 he was a history professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. In 1967 he joined the faculty at Kent State University, where he would remain until his retirement in 1993. Although he was not an African American himself, Meier wrote so fairly about important figures such as Frederick Douglas and W. E. B. Du Bois that he was sometimes mistaken for being black by those who read his work. Of the books he wrote and edited, the one that is often considered his most significant was also his first, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (1963). He also edited Black Nationalism in America (1970), and wrote Black Detroit and the Rise of the U.A.W. (1979) and A White Scholar and the Black Community, 1945-1965 (1992), among other books.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Martin, Waldo E., and Patricia Sullivan, editors, Civil Rights in the United States, Macmillan Reference (New York, NY), 2000.

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2003, p. B17.

New York Times, March 25, 2003, p. A17.